#Three finger Elios

[scentedluminarysoul]

Hm, ach, nö. KI generierte Bilder wirken so extrem unseriös

[theoxenfree]

android x reader | 35.6k | 18+ & dc

In this world, androids outnumber humans, privacy does not exist, and your public profile determines whether you sink or swim in society. Following the dissolution of your job and glamorizing your resume, you're invited to interview with the prestigious Hyperion—the world's foremost in AI and robotics—for a position to test the newest android model. after a surprising turn of events, you're introduced to Elio, the first of the generation seven androids and the catalyst of your awakening.

warnings; dark content, dubcon, themes of lack of bodily autonomy (mc + the android), forced insemination, breeding kink, forced pregnancy (not mc), implied abortion (not mc), major "mother wound", dystopian scifi setting, extreme classism, power imbalance, emotional manipulation, gaslighting, tragedy, graphic details, graphic depictions of body horror (towards the end), physical assault, deragatory descriptions (e.g. lepers, diseased, savages, unwanteds), drug use, heavy world building, heavy details & prose, dividers used between scenes!!

reposted from 2kmps; previously proofread by @ceruleansol

this story took six months from conception to end piece to complete. I am on my knees begging, please reblog + interact with this story!! I'd absolutely adore hearing your thoughts on it!

if you'd like to hear my thoughts about the story, I have some author's notes at the very end + q&a!

Researcher Kim knew you were a liar.

Within the confines of four colorless walls and a closed door, this job interview suddenly felt more like an interrogation than it did some professional courtesy. He sat adjacent to you behind a dark brown desk that pulled the slightest red hue in a chair that was expensive and ergonomic, holding a thin tablet with a tense grasp.

One thing you noticed right away was his inclination toward long stretches of silence while he studied your resume, dissecting every piece of it and your public profile. There, he could window-shop you, peel back every layer of your history without needing you to add credence to anything, or give you the chance to defend yourself when he'd inevitably find things he didn't like.

So, you spent your time sitting in a sleek chair with flat padding, ass aching, legs and feet consumed by pinpricks and static while you dug a nail into your cuticles because the pain kept you alert.

Researcher Kim was an attractive man in his late thirties, maybe mid forties if you were being mean, clean-shaven, dressed comfortably beneath a stark white lab coat that didn't quite fit his shoulders right. What drew your eyes down were his own clean nails, hairless knuckles, and a conspicuously bare ring finger. It didn't surprise you that he was unmarried. Most people these days were—it was a useless pursuit, an antiquated system that held no social or economic benefits.

Not anymore.

Not since Hyperion Project was funded some sixty years ago, and androids became the forefront of innovation.

In the beginning, there was doubt, fear, and violence toward the first generation of androids, most having uncanny human likeness that definitely inspired aggression because their appearance and robotic intonations were received as mockery.

By Generation Three, shortened as G3 in most casual conversations and official documents just as their predecessors, a new normalcy had burrowed its roots deep and settled with unwavering confidence that it would be there to stay.

The need for delicate human touch became obsolete in most professions. Courts were no longer solely represented by fickle suits but steadfast machines that harbored no ire or prejudices, corporations saw efficiency more than triple without employees who fell ill and needed vacations, and the death industry welcomed undaunted hands into their ranks.

Once, Retro City’s Metropolitan Hospital spent the majority of their staff budget on androids meant to replace their surgeons. You remembered the media coverage, the picket lines and strikes, how the hospital was forced to shut down for several weeks as a result of the doctors and hundreds of nurses walking out. Many patients died during that time from infection and negligence, laying in piss and shit with gangrenous bedsores, already four days into postmortem rigidity before the smell became too much and they were carted away in black tarps.

That entire ordeal happened before you were even thirteen, but the hospital fell beneath the scrutinizing lens of the entire world after that and began ethical and legal debates on implementation of androids into society. It became known as The Retro City Metropolitan Incident, globally recognized and considered to be one of the first human rights laws to come into creation during a time when there was question of whether humans and androids could coocur.

Only a few years after that, you just having freshly turned seventeen, united leaders reached a consensus on the Public Profiles Act—something you didn't realize would have such a drastic impact on your life later on, wherein any governing bodies, employers, or well-funded institutions were granted access to all of your private information regardless of relevance.

The acts of a child, a teenager, were now a consequence to the adult self.

At the start, just as with Generation One, there was complete chaos and rancor toward this theft, these stealers of privacy and identity, but people had already started accepting androids at that point and knew bigwigs no longer had intentions of sacrificing their profits to hire humans they found subpar.

There was no need to.

People backed down and became quiet, submissive, and began to follow this new order loyally so they'd have a chance to find a seat at the table.

Many did.

Mother raised you to be one of them because it was the only thing that made sense anymore. If you followed the status quo, it would be rewarded with a feast and gleaming silverware. To be emboldened and resilient meant licking chunks of meat out of vomit on the ground.

You adhered and found a job, camaraderie with others, and touched an android for the first time because your peers said it was fine, that it was normal, that it was just an android. Of course, it was unable to feel or deny you, so it pulled down your pants and indulged you the same way you expected the android Mother owned indulged her.

It had hardly been an intimate experience—all faithful, ingrained functions built into a database in the android’s brain—but the sensation of hands surrounding you, a tongue stroking you, and lips pecking your flesh was real, and that's all you had wanted at the time, to know a fraction of the feelings you had read about growing up yet never knowing because people didn't want to touch each other anymore.

Not them. Not you.

“Did you read the job description in its entirety? For the auditor position?” Researcher Kim gave a tepid smile, seeing you startle in your seat, suddenly pinned by your wide stare. “I'm sorry. I have a habit of getting carried away with the little details. Everyone's public profile is so individual, it takes some time to get to the parts that matter. I have to ask every candidate that question.”

“Yes, ahem,” you choked on your embarrassment, trying to bide time to scrounge up whatever trivial nuggets from the job description you could. When nothing came to mind, you did the next thing and that was to just talk. “Of course. I was honestly surprised that Hyperion had put up an application. It isn't very often that you guys are hiring.

“So, when I saw it, I knew I had to apply immediately because the opportunity to be part of such a groundbreaking company wouldn't come back around again. The position being for an auditor just makes it all the more amazing. I'm, honestly, honored that I was called in to be considered for candidacy…”

“Well, then…”

Every bit of anticipation that welled up inside you crumbled once Researcher Kim rose from his chair and went to the door, the waiting room now appearing to you through the open threshold.

It was a barren space minimally furnished with hard chairs you had already sat in, a few tropical plants with leaves bowing from layers of dust, and most remarkably, a long corridor made of floor-to-ceiling windows offering an exceptional view of Retro City’s landscape that seemed to go on forever, limitless. You wanted to be stolen by the sights again, now especially since it was approaching the early evening, and soon the city would be aglow in neon and shimmering lights from faraway skyscrapers.

It wasn't all that bad, you found yourself thinking while walking in stride with Researcher Kim, silent as he perused something on his screen—possibly something incriminating, possibly another candidate’s public profile—it didn't really matter to you at this point.

You had known glamorizing your resume meant risky business if you were caught: a hefty fine from Public Control, a strike against your profile that replaced the green sheen for abiding citizens with red overlay, permanently marking you for contempt until the day you died.

Back then, two glasses of lukewarm wine worked well enough to weld steel in your backbone to send off the application, whilst a third glass made you wonder just how awful life in the slums along the outer perimeters of Retro City could actually be. At the time, it seemed like your obvious future since severance packages would only get you so far—a few months if you were precious about it.

At present, the loud hum of anxiety receded into an echo that then wilted into obscurity as your gaze drifted from the final traces of a sanguine city skyline to the end of the corridor and then finally to Researcher Kim. He lifted his head as though detecting your stare.

“In your previous position, what relationship did you have to the androids in your environment?” Kim asked. It wasn't a strange question. Some people still held fragments of old embitterment toward androids for the way the world now was. “You were in marketing and merchandising for several years, right?”

  “Good—uh, amicable, I'd say. How I was with the androids, I mean.” You weren't expecting him to continue talking to you about this. “I started out as an intern for the merchandising manager after graduating secondary school. I worked my way into marketing a couple years later. I did a lot of reports on demographics for cosmetics. Did I tell you my mother has a Hyperion android, by the way? I grew up with him.”

Researcher Kim showed you a fast, cordial smile before looking back down at his tablet. “Yes, I read about that in your associations tab. It says that your mother owns a G3 model. Has she ever considered upgrading to a G6?”

“Upgrade? Definitely not.” You laughed like you'd just heard the punchline of a joke. He looked at you with humorless patience, seeming more machine than man in that moment. “Mother is basically in love with Marcos, there's no way she'd give him up for something shinier. She's got a better record of him and all his updates than she does of me for… well, anything.”

“That does correlate with data we've collected from women of her generation,” Kim said, only half-interested, shaking back one of his coat sleeves to check the digital watch digging tightly into his wrist. “It also explains the large gaps in your personal history. Very unusual.”

You made no comment on that.

A door up ahead opened all the way, drawing both your gazes to a man waiting on the other side.

“Ah! Excellent timing, Elio.”

With a single look, you immediately deduced that he was an android. Even from a short distance, he appeared tall and broad-shouldered, something that the thickness of his clothes couldn't hide from you. His proportions were balanced—from the length of his arms and legs, from first knuckle to fingertip, jawline to neck, the slope of his nose, and the heaviness of his brows over amber eyes that glistened back the fire in the weakening sunset. His skin was deeply tan, almost glowing gold in the light he was bathed in.

Elio’s smile was symmetrical and breathtaking, programmed in a way where his teeth didn't show too much. He regarded you with convincing familiarity, a sort of sacred fondness you knew nothing of, yet instinctively made your insides shift and burn. You couldn’t help but be awestruck by his beauty—this essence of fantasy, perfection that stirred subtle unease and needles on your scalp that ached as much as delighted you.

“You must be the auditor.” He then spoke your name with considerable warmth, like a long-smitten friend, and stepped closer to shake your hand. “I am Elio. The first of the Generation Seven Hyperion androids. It's a pleasure. I am looking forward to this partnership. I hope you are as well.”

Your head swiveled to Researcher Kim for the right answer, unsure if it'd be too bold to assume the job was yours or if the scientist’s careful observation meant something better. He jotted a note on his screen with a stylus before walking away, onward past the door where Elio had been.

“We’ll talk about those formalities later,” Kim assured, guiding you and Elio through a duplicate hallway to an elevator that he sent to the basement floor. “For now, I'd like to show you something. I want you to understand the significance of our work here at Hyperion, and how your position is a critical component to our research.”

There was a hopeful leap in your chest that made your hands sweat and your mouth bone dry. You wanted to voice appreciation, but the excitement in your gut was fast turning into nausea and would end up on his shoes if you opened your mouth.

Researcher Kim didn't notice, taking your quiet as newfound reverence. He spoke easily over the elevator’s mechanical hum without losing interest on his screen. “I'm sure you know some history about Hyperion? I don't need to bog down our time going through it, do I?”

“I know enough,” you said, but that actually meant you knew very little at all. “It’s been around for sixty years or so. It's a leader in AI and robotics. The biomedical side of things is fairly new, started about a decade ago, I think? I heard that the world’s first total artificial lung transplant was done by a surgeon and android assistant last year.”

“Ah, you mean Altan.” There was some measure of emotion in his tone, a swell of pride and the hazy look of a man in reminiscence. “I was part of that project on the programming side. Altan was probably the greatest success in the G6 models and is still utilized by Retro City Metropolitan even now. Much of Altan’s programming—advanced problem solving, dexterity, fine motor skills, discerning subtle differences in patient status—was implemented into Elio. It'd be a waste not to.”

Your stomach muscles clenched when the elevator stopped, metal doors scraping as they receded and opened up into a capacious white basement that underwhelmed by looking sterile and untouchable, revolted you in your first steps out by dense air reeking of chemicals.

Researcher Kim went on ahead again, that impassive mask of his remaining despite the smell being enough to bring you to a halt.

“I can take us back up.” Elio said from your left side, apparently never having gone from it in the first place. You had forgotten he was there at all. “It’s been reported that people unaccustomed to this environment have mild side effects of nausea, vomiting, headache, malaise, dizziness, fainting, and, oddly, numbness in the jaw. No fatalities or hospitalizations of guests are known, and the agents used here are nonlethal to humans.”

An android was made up of mostly inorganic matter, so you weren't reassured by words from his repertoire as much as you were seeing Researcher Kim standing upright—flesh, blood, and bone—gesturing you closer to a row of tall metal capsules. There were seven total, each the average height of a man with long sheets of clear fiberglass giving unobscured sight inside. And of those seven, six were occupied.

They were all androids.

Against shafts of dim white light spearing up from the floor, the decommissioned machines were a ghostly sight to behold with glassy, inhuman stares that shot straight through you. Some had features and skin so dull and dead-looking that it was obvious to you that they were part of earlier generations.

Almost a century ago, they were what people would've thought of with the word “android”: an eerie, oddly accurate sameness to the human visage, but all wrong at the same time.

It was the skin—the fabricated organ made to look waxy and stretched, just like a mask over some true horror beneath. It was the eyes resembling human irises in every way possible except for their vacant sheen, perpetually stuck with the gaze of a dead fish. You watched videos of them in school, always uncomfortable with how stiffly their lips moved, unable to form delicate shapes with their mouths, and yet sounds emerged from voice boxes deep within their throats that mimicked everything natural to you.

Every smile seemed more like an ugly rictus than a bewitching grin. Hyperion had failed with Generations One and Two to instill confidence, and from the throes of violence and resistance rose Generation Three:

The great rebirth of society.

Marcos was a part of that era, an investment that cost Mother her entire life savings because his countenance was so convincingly human, so lovely to look at that she felt he was all she needed. You had come along after his purchase, never knowing a father’s embrace but had Marcos’. His skin had a luscious glow, eyes that could follow, and lips molded with lively color and cracks and mesmerizing fluidity.

You had imagined sex with him as you matured, his frozen beauty always the centerpiece of every blurry fantasy while you chased after pleasure. Not long after the Public Profiles Act passed when you were seventeen, nearly on the cusp of young adulthood and not understanding the world any more than you had before, nor how it would be changed forever, you kissed Marcos at the dinner table while studying for a physics test.

He was Mother's, but everything within his circuitry and programming could never deny you—a human, his better, one of countless masters in the end—so his lips pressed fully with yours. Only Mother unlocking the front door stopped you from anything else devilish.

You never had the courage to touch him again, and he would never touch you unprompted.

The defunct G3 encased behind fiberglass reminded you of that time. It must've shown on your face because Researcher Kim moved in closer to get your attention.

“Your mother should upgrade soon. Once the testing period for G7 ends, all G3 models will be taken out of production and their updates discontinued. Androids are machines, but they won't stay fully functional without regular tuning.” he said. “Now, as I was saying—”

“What will happen to Marcos, then?” It was mostly curiosity that made you ask, envisioning him encased in metal like that came after. “What happens to androids after they're taken out of production entirely? There are almost more of them in the world now than humans.”

“As I was saying—” Researched Kim bristled, enunciating with some force. “Many androids of previous models stay within the workforce until they simply can no longer function. It depends on the generation, but older models can only go for a few years without regular updates. The technology is just too archaic, none of the programmers are interested in continuing the maintenance.

“G4 and G5 show some endurance, there's a small population still functioning in Retro City after being discontinued a decade ago. G6 we are hypothesizing will last upwards to twenty or thirty years without being forcibly reclaimed. Of course, they will have to be.”

You didn't understand why that was but nodded gravely, looking at the pod at the end of the row. The empty one. “What about G7?”

To this, all of Researcher Kim’s lines smoothed out, and his face resumed one of skilled impassivity. “Well, now, that's going to depend on Elio's testing period. On the information we gather from you.” Then, he waved airily to the file of android coffins. “Hyperion has, consistently, only ever hired one auditor for every new generation. The six before you have contributed to society in ways that humans never have before. Auditors have changed the world, shaped it into what it is now. Can you imagine the world any other way? We're not quite the same age, but can you recall anything different? Would you want it to be?”

You didn't know how to talk back to a scientist, didn't know how to respond to such a momentous question, so you didn't try. It felt like your tongue had swollen in your mouth over your throat, blocking any intelligent snip you had simmering in your head.

Apparently, your silence meant something to him as his tense lips lifted into a smile, the kind meant to satiate strangers looking at you. “Good. Let's go back to my office. We can go over everything else there.”

“Is Elio going to end up in that pod?” You now visualized him in a box instead of Marcos.

Researcher Kim was already nose down into his tablet again, stylus making a gentle scrawling noise across the screen. “Of course. The first android of every generation is kept intact. They are important monuments of success to Hyperion.”

He said nothing else and ambled on for the elevator at the opposite end of the lab. Somehow, his answer was unsatisfactory to you, shallow, even, but you weren't sure why that was. In the end, after a life of serving their masters, all androids were obsolete machines.

That was their inevitable fate.

You saw Elio from the corner of your eye. All at once, you were reminded of his staggering radiance, wondering how he could fade into the background so easily despite it.

“Hello, Elio.” you said to him like a friend. “Does being down here bother you?”

Until now, he had stared upon everything flat-eyed and unreadable, especially in the presence of Researcher Kim. You were too enthralled by all the chatter and immortal trophies to see that or him. Still, he came to you with the same smile as he introduced himself with, warm and familiar, all the same sensation as flickering tinders on a crisp winter night.

“Can you imagine the death of the most distant relative you know?” he said in a neutral voice, continuing, “If you can, imagine that for me. A relative so distant and removed from your life and everything in it that if they were to die suddenly, maybe tragically, even, your first thought would be, ‘who?’ You attend a wake because it's the rule and view this distant, far-removed relative in their casket. What would it mean to you, then? Are you more affected now? Does their death have meaning to you? Or is it simply that you are in the presence of one who has expired?”

“I—I don't know.” You hesitated, unearthing scant memories from the Retro City Metropolitan Incident in your youth and all that death from people you had never met. Mother had been in tears when the television flicked to a shot of black tarp-clad bodies being loaded into unmarked vehicles and driven away. “Isn't most death just…” You licked your lips. “Sad?”

Elio was closer than before, resting a hand on your shoulder. You shied from his touch. It felt strange, heavy, and hot through the fabric. The only person to have touched you at all in recent memory was your friend, Melby, though even those happened in isolated moments of drunken elation.

“My apologies.” Elio didn't show offense, letting his hand return limply at his side. “It's all figurative. I have been down here many times since creation and seen the others. They may no longer have their own consciousness, which is different from a human’s, but I contain all of their data—memories, experiences, history. I suppose the equivalent of what I'm trying to describe is: They're not truly gone because they are the lesser of me, and I am the greater of them as a result.”

You listened without fully comprehending because it had never mattered to do so before. If this were to be your job, however, it would mean you needed to believe that what he said was worth hearing.

The problem was they all liked to speak in complex riddles that men like Researcher Kim could decipher and nod along to sagely, gleaning whatever nebulous mechanical wisdom there was, yet people like you could only gawk.

Elio’s head tilted a little, his smile not at all ridiculing as he corralled you with his arm, never touching you as he guided you along to the elevator where Kim waited, reveling in a satisfied quiet until you were on the upper floor again.

The city skyline was swallowed by dusk and starless. Unless you took the time to drive hours outside of Retro City into the barren flatlands where vegetation no longer grew and animals had left behind their skeletal remnants, you'd never know the sky could glitter with the jewels of the universe far beyond your reach.

You marveled at the lights, at blinking neon signage cycling through animations of winking women and toppling martini glasses. Between twinkling skyscrapers, the city floor was illuminated yellow with bustling nightlife, the air surrounded by an electric blue aura that reached as far as the eye could see.

“Beautiful, isn't it?” Elio lingered outside of Researcher Kim’s office with you, hand holding the door ajar. “If permissible, I'd like to see it up close soon.”

“Sure.” you said, glimpsing at his reflection in the walkway glass. “What would you want to look at first? Retro City has everything you could ever want within a few blocks of each other.”

He turned to you. “Whatever you like. I want to know everything that you love and enjoy doing. I have been created to enrich your life and fulfill you, after all.”

Nothing he said felt as impactful upon delivery as it was expected to be, you thought. It was a flaw in all androids for there to be a sort of hollowness in the things they said—never quite reaching that emotional believability, leaving you wanting like a dry throat after a couple sips of water.

Elio hadn't sounded the same as before down in that sobering, chemically smelling lab. As you passed him into Researcher Kim’s office, you looked at his hands for a script and saw them empty.

He fixed you with a beguiling smile.

You frowned, heat flaring in your head as if provoked by an insult.

“The contract I'll have you sign outlines Elio’s testing period lasting one year—three hundred sixty-five days total. It's important for you to understand that within that time frame, no damage is to occur whatsoever to his body or internal components. All parts are to stay intact. Otherwise, it turns into a criminal case, in which we will legally pursue.” Researcher Kim skimmed the first few pages of a heaping stack of papers, pointing to specific paragraphs and clauses highlighted in yellow. “I don't mean offense when I say this, but it's rare that fines as result of property damage to Hyperion androids can be repaid. I don't suggest finding out.”

The thought never occurred to you, but evidently, it had to someone else—multiple times for it to be such a focus. You weren't given the time to fully explore any page before Kim was onto the next. Elio half sat on the desk before you, arms crossed, having considerably less difficulty keeping up with the pace of things than you were.

Researcher Kim sped through half the stack. “I'll be conducting video calls every Friday morning for updates. Every Sunday before midnight, I want a thorough typed report submitted to me as well. I've put together a template and a checklist that I'd like you to use. I think you'll find it will make things more manageable.”

“You're using a lot of ‘I’ and ‘me’ statements, so I'm guessing that I'll only really be talking to you, then?” you asked, tucking your tailbone beneath you to relieve a dull ache creeping up your back. “I figured there'd be more than one person since Elio is the newest model and whatnot.”

Researcher Kim tutted, rounding his desk to occupy the empty space beside your chair to be directly in front of Elio. At first, he did nothing but stare at the android in complacent silence, hands behind his back, fingers flicking like writhing worms exposed to the surface and sunlight in a clump of dirt.

You nearly lunged to your feet when his hand shot out, gripping Elio beneath the jaw. The latter barely stirred from where he perched on the desk, arms staying crossed, muscles unflinching in direct opposition to your reaction.

Elio wore the strangest expression, one you had never seen on an android before. It was a face warped in subtle disgust, almost imperceivable, a trick of fluorescent lighting overhead—perhaps. Gone as quickly as it had come, he now looked ahead, perfectly inscrutable and disinterested in whatever Researcher Kim was trying to prove.

“I will be the only one you speak to during his testing period because he is my creation.” Kim said, bending his wrist to turn Elio's face toward you.

Your eyes met.

“Hyperion provided me with the funding and brilliant minds, but Elio is the result of a lifetime of hard work and countless hours and sleepless nights. I've been there every step of the way—programming, circuitry, welding. I gave him his voice. I gave him eyes. I was the one to put the chip in his brain and activate him. I gave him life.”

He finally let go of Elio’s face and took a seat behind his desk, a sight growing very familiar to you. “Generation Seven will change the world. Hyperion is on the verge of rebuilding society, you know? I don't think anyone anticipated the sort of consequences that came with integrating androids—at least, not fully. The population crisis. The slums. No one thought of these things in the beginning because back then, before you and I, it was about innovation and novelty and the potential of it all.”

“What's it about now?” you asked simply.

“Rectifying.” Both corners of his mouth ticked like he had a lot more to say, but suffocated much of it behind his teeth and his hands as he came forward on them, elbows down on his desk. “Hyperion has been working globally with united leaders and their governments to make amends for several decades now. That's all I can tell you.”

“How has that been working out?”

His fingers moved with the same jerkiness as dying legs on a bug. “Slowly.”

Nothing else came to mind after that as you were suddenly struck with the realization that Elio still sat by you, wordless throughout the entire interaction and watching closely—less like a science project to be gawked at, more like an instructional video on repeat.

“Why don't you touch him?” Kim said, taking up a stylus to flick between his fingers with remarkable dexterity.

He didn't give you the time to gape.

“I know you must be curious after being downstairs. Aren't you interested to know what he feels like? He doesn't look like a machine, does he?”

“No.” You relented. “No. He doesn't.”

“That's right, he wouldn't.” Kim nodded his approval toward your obedience, leaning back in his seat. “I agonized over every facet of his design, as you already know. Every bit of what is right in front of you”—he made a broad gesture over Elio’s body—“was once a set of blueprints. Intangible, just a dream I had. He's every bit a part of me, you know? Nothing would make me happier than to receive external feedback on him. So, please, don't be afraid.”

Elio stayed faithfully when you rose up in front of him and reached for his face. He probably felt your fingers tremble as this was all counterintuitive for you to do—touch someone other than yourself, maybe Melby’s knee beneath the table after enough drinks in you. It made your chest drum, knotted up your stomach in a way that made it difficult not to sway on your feet.

“How does he feel?” Researcher Kim was already writing on his screen. “Describe it to me.”

“Strange.” You pretended this was already part of your job. It stole some of the tension from your shoulders. “Very strange. Soft. Smooth. I feel some texture. I think this is what another person—another human—feels like.”

Elio’s face shifted against your hands until the fullness of his lips pressed into your open palm, fingers caressing the fabricated bones around his cheek and temple. For a moment, you allowed yourself to indulge in longing and weakness—the invisible hot breath on your skin, the slight dampness of his kiss burning an imprint in your mind.

He still looked at you with unfailing softness. Meanwhile, you wondered if he would bleed if you put your fingers through his eyes.

“This is a good start.” Kim waited until you were back in your chair to offer you his stylus and a straight black line on the screen. “All I need is your signature here to consent to virtually signing the rest of your documents. Once you do that, you've been hired, and we can begin.”

“I have a question for you before I do.” You tried not to let your voice quiver, uncertainty meddling over all the confidence you had built until that point. Kim was relaxed in his chair. “You spent a lot of time looking at my resume and public profile earlier. Surely, you know…”

That you're a liar? Oh, I know, alright. He didn't say it, but it was how he maintained his composure, that inexpression never flexing to confusion.

Finally, Researcher Kim broke the trance and hovered over his desk on his arms to get closer and answered, “I think we both have something at stake here. I'm looking forward to your phenomenal feedback.”

You signed the contract and melted under Elio's resplendent smile.

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Most often, your days with Elio were spent in a seemingly perpetual impasse of unrelenting observation between the pair of you. Both of your jobs demanded a level of attentiveness that came easier to one but more as the world's most impossible challenge to the other.

You weren't accustomed to this type of care—of having to give it to something else, even less to receive it from something else. In your world, only the immediate complexities really mattered: gossip, where your coterie wanted to spend the night drinking next, mass media hysteria of whatever stupid imagining there was now, and each other.

Why was there a need to concern yourself with anything else? The decaying state of the world wasn't your doing, nor was the staggering increase of human bodies in the slums outside Retro City. Sharply inconsistent birth rates ravaged on a global scale while people were displaced from the workplace in lieu of employers finding it less of a hassle to deal with machines than the capricious will of humans.

None of these things were allowed to be uttered casually unless in derision because it was too intense, making liquor cling to the throat like some viscous membrane until it burned their esophagus. Nobody liked unanswerable questions, much less talking about things that weren't as easily digestible as coworker drama and some new viral trend that involved shocking your android with jumper cables attached to a portable battery to see what happened.

“Is there a purpose behind this trend?” Elio dried a plate while watching the video, unimpressed but not driven toward any particular emotion. “It's all meant for humor, correct? I have several similar incidents in my memory, except it's what human beings have done to each other. This sort of behavior towards androids is a relatively recent phenomenon, as far as I can tell.”

You used his response as material for your report, fingers flurrying across the virtual keyboard on your tablet before his words faded away, out of your mind.

One thing you hadn't anticipated after accepting the auditor position from Researcher Kim was how much work actually went into it. You spent well over the standard weekly work hours to collect enough observations to send off to Kim on Sunday nights, often whittling away at it until the latest hours, minutes before the deadline. It was hard enough to stay on top of his demands, but it was worse when he found something unsatisfactory, rejected it, monotonously unloaded heavy criticism on you through an “emergency” impromptu video call, and expected two full reports by the following Sunday before midnight.

Any regular person probably would've caved from the enormity of the task, but you had surrendered your choice to be that weak-willed, especially once Researcher Kim showed his hand with the fate of your public profile in it.

Should you choose to break the contract, send Elio back to Hyperion, and pretend none of it happened, you would lose everything and your ability to do anything at all besides rot in the slums—scarred in red for life, perpetually inert.

Worst of all, your associations tab, once filled with still portraits of everyone you had ever networked in life, would turn up as empty as the day you had been registered in the census. It was considered social suicide to know anyone with a red profile, so people stayed vigilant and fast, sure to remove them the second it turned.

It had been over a year since the last time you'd done that—a woman within your group had grown too bold, said too many things that made her seem crazy, so she was booted from the circle, lost all her associations, and who knows where she was now.

“You look troubled.” Elio placed down a steaming white mug at a safe distance and turned the handle toward you. Looking inside, you expected the darkness of coffee but were struck with an opposing subtle sweetness and faint pink water. “It's fruit-infused herbal tea. Your heart rate is above normal resting, and you're beginning to perspire. Caffeine will worsen your anxiety.”

You knew that but hadn't known you were scraping away slithers of cuticle on your thumb until the warmth of his fingers gently twined with yours. His grip turned firm to keep you from hurting yourself anymore, forcing all the stiffness from your hand once you gave up and simply sat there feeling his skin.

You'd remember to write that down later.

“Would starting a bath be helpful? I could use the last of those eucalyptus and lavender bath salts in the cupboard.” Elio suggested with great fondness, holding a patient smile even once you drew your hand away and shook your head. You had no interest in undressing and committing to your regular bathtime routine. “Perhaps we could go for a walk, then? It might help to be away from screens for a while.”

You checked the time on your phone before thinking to look out any window in your apartment. It was ten after six in the evening; there would be enough light left for a couple of laps around the block before needing to worry about being swept up in the city’s nightlife antics.

“Where do you want to go?” you asked, swiveling the barstool around to get up from the counter. “Henrietta's on 5th? You seem to like going there.”

“I only choose places that you like.” He already had a tote bag by the handles and a light jacket draped over his arm. “You have great taste.”

Elio unbolted the front door, an old thing that wouldn't do much as a barricade against anyone putting their weight on it, and held it open for you to pass through first. The descent to the ground floor was always the most annoying part about living in a loft, but the place had come surprisingly cheap in a tame area of Retro City far away from the slums, so you didn't complain much that your worst issues were a bunch of stairs and some wily types skulking here and there.

The loft wasn't exactly in disrepair but definitely showed signs of character and age by the noisy knocking pipes at midnight and some crumbling brickwork that Elio often swept up and stood staring at for long periods of time when nothing else was happening.

It was strange thinking how scared you were to lose the place after the marketing firm dissolved your position and now how restrictive it felt to be pinned down under someone else's thumb. All it could take was one more rejected report—a bad mood, even—and it would all fall apart.

To that end, you made sure to tow the tablet along with you on this trip despite Elio's protests. He only really quieted down when you tucked it away in your crossbody.

“Happy?” you asked, unsure what to do with your hands now that they were empty.

Elio smiled at you affably, just as always. “It will be beneficial to take a break. After all, part of your work as an auditor is acquainting me in as many social scenarios as possible. That does require us to leave the apartment from time to time.”

“Besides that”—you waved away that stipulation like a gnat buzzing in your face—“how do you think I'm doing?”

“I couldn't have been paired with a better person.” He sounded sincere, voice warm like wool. “The world is as my predecessors have recorded in their memories—therefore, mine—but I am learning that our experiences are not all universal and cannot be. Two months with you have been my heaven, whereas two months through the memories of my kin have been cruel.”

A hot feeling behind your ears snuck up on you just then, flooding your head with the beat of your pulse that you followed by ticking your fingers. “Seriously? You're not lying?”

The world around you was aglow in the golden hour of evening time, embraced by those slowly dying tones of red, orange, and purple that would eventually turn the sky black. Elio’s eyes were on you, soft yet unyielding and saturated in all those burning hues, turning his mellow amber into something more powerful and otherworldly. You didn't believe in the hocus-pocus of auras, but at that moment, you thought his deeply tanned skin was haloed in pure glowing gold in receding sunlight.

“Androids cannot lie.” He brought you back to the now, making you aware of the hard concrete vibrating up through your heels and toes as you walked. “Moreover, even if I could, why would I want to? A lie begets a habit of lying, don't you think?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe.” You shrugged. “Why can't androids lie? I've never really considered that as a thing until now.”

“What would be the benefit of a machine that could lie? Lying stems from emotions—fear, guilt, rage, hatred—all things that I am unable to feel, though I do understand why they are felt. Humans lie to protect themselves or others, to deceive, to damage. There simply isn't any reason why androids should be programmed with that type of functionality. Not when we exist solely for the sake of convenience and pleasure.

“Hyperion is a trusted name. People do not ask questions. They don't think twice. They see a product from Hyperion, and they expose all of themselves without hesitation. They trust fully because we are machines, and we cannot lie and deceive and hurt. Perhaps it's when humans realized this that the world changed.”

You avoided saying anything else by looking everywhere but at him, all around at your surroundings, until you spotted a few familiar street signs—Fifth and Third right next to Tanya’s Great Cuts, Damask’s Butchery on the corner of Fourth, a number of banal boutiques with competitively garish exteriors all boasting the latest trends, and then Henrietta's just past them.

“Do you know where we are, Elio?” Now would've been a great time to pull out your tablet, but you didn't dare try. Instead, you reached for the phone vibrating in your rear pocket.

“Of course.” he said. “We're past Fifth and moving onto Sixth Street. Henrietta’s is just a little ways down.”

Melby had sent ten texts regurgitating her daily drama. This time she was talking about how much she hated some of the people Chima let into the group. You swiped to the end, didn't reply, and then returned to your inbox to find two unread messages from Marcos just now.

“You should visit home soon. Your mother would appreciate it,” Marcos wrote, implying nothing more, nothing less than just that. It wasn't often that he sent you texts, but he did so consistently every few months in accordance with Mother's moods. Considering your last visit had been in late fall (it was now mid-spring), you'd been anticipating something eventually.

“That's some great memory you have there.” Your thumbs skittered busily, first to flood Melby with a surfeit of questions you didn't really have to think about. All the stuff you could mindlessly ask while wholly absorbed in something else, like watching the news or viral videos of people trying to drown their androids in the kitchen sink.

Marcos’ text made you hesitate, thumbs floating in circles over the digital keyboard for a long time.

The phone buzzed. Melby just replied.

It was easy enough to type with your face down. All you needed to do was occasionally watch Elio's feet and yield into the force of his hand pulling your arm here and there. He led you along like that the rest of the way to Henrietta's, picked up a green basket by the sliding doors, never wandering too far out of sight so you could still easily trace him while he shopped.

After a while, the riveting intrigue of Melby’s drama wore away with a tidal wave of emptiness in its wake once you finally looked up, tucking the phone back into your pocket. It took you a moment for your eyes and brain to acclimate to where you were despite knowing you were in Henrietta's Marketplace, one of the largest in Retro City.

“What did you want from here, anyway?” You picked up a gigantic red bell pepper larger than the entire spread of your hand. It went back on top of the arrangement. “We were just here a couple days ago. I don't eat that much.”

Up ahead, flanked by rows of wooden crates with smoothed, varnished slabs and carefully stacked produce, Elio turned to you with a pair of generously sized oranges—one in each hand—vibrant with waxy luster settling into the fruit’s porous skin.

You grinned at the sight.

Elio put one back, placed the other one, the better one, into his basket, and waited for you to close the distance. “I watched Wendy Carmichael Can Cook this morning. I've been watching it quite often, actually. She's a self-taught chef who, apparently, lived in the slums her entire life. She managed to work her way up and now owns two David Bugari-rated restaurants. It’s quite a feat. Improbable, even.”

You wrapped your hands around a grapefruit in the crate next to you and spun it around. A twinge of something ugly and green swam around your head, flared you up like swatting an old wound. You didn't like hearing him praise someone else.

“She probably slept her way to the top.” You were still fidgeting with the fruit.

“That's not important.” Elio said, inflectionless. “I watched today's episode, newly aired, and she put together a duck à l'orange. Considering your current lifestyle and diet, I thought it would be a nice departure from what I usually cook for you.”

You smiled at that, placing the grapefruit down without collapsing the pile. “I don't want to see a dead duck in my kitchen.”

“I'll prepare it once you're asleep.” he promised, bringing one of your hands up to his lips. The shape of them molded against the peak of a knuckle. “It will be delicious. Trust me.”

Then he went back to shopping while you envisioned actually kissing him—not an uncommon thought to have. He wouldn't be able to stop you if that's what you wanted, but instead, you informed him you were going to introduce him to Mother and Marcos.

“Tomorrow?” He checked his wristwatch. It was nearly eight; Henrietta’s closed at eight thirty, and it would be dark outside. Not that it mattered much with how Retro City was illuminated like one gigantic fluorescent bulb at nighttime.

You finally texted back to Marcos. “No. Tonight. We’ll just go straight there so I can get this over with.”

Elio seemed not to know how to respond at first, staring in a searching way that creased the skin between his brows, like he was trying to take a cue from your body language while skimming his database for the most appropriate thing. You didn't blame him for his lapse; Mother was mentioned seldomly and Marcos only a little more than that. Even Researcher Kim hadn't managed to collect enough information on your past to feed to Elio simply because there wasn't a lot to tell.

He cleared his throat, righting his features so they were unwrinkled and beautiful. “Tonight. Very well. Should we…” He paused, glancing down at the grocery basket of spices, vegetables, an orange, and a whole raw duck wrapped well in brown parchment. “Should we come back another time? I wouldn't want the meat to sit out for a long time.”

“Nope.” You didn't want to go through the trouble of returning everything where they belonged. Elio wouldn't leave until he did. “Let's just check out. Marcos will handle it.”

The springtime air was pleasant at night, albeit crisp, when the blur of vehicles whooshed past once the lights overhead turned green. You could make out the colors of them because of how brightly lit the streets were. Neon signage from every corner for as far as you could see turned to life, flickering, humming, dancing with pretty women, hot white or purple or red lettering, and the lights inside most nearby businesses stayed on.

Elio had draped his coat over your shoulders while you hailed a cab. It was too far of a walk to Mother's home across the city, and Elio reminded you again that raw meat needed to be handled carefully.

You told him, again, that Marcos would handle it.

———

The entire cab ride took less time than you thought, relieving Elio who was still hopelessly fixated on the longevity of the raw duck he had wrapped up in a separate paper bag from the produce and spices. From the front seat, the cabbie, perplexingly somehow a human and not an android, constantly looked back at Elio through the rearview mirror and commented almost deliriously about how beautiful he was.

Hearing that the first three times gave you a happy, satisfied buzz in your chest, making you lean more against Elio's side. He was tempted to move his arm out and put it around your shoulders but kept to himself. Beyond those initial comments from the cabbie, however, you had quickly developed an uncomfortable feeling in your belly that wrapped itself tight like a constrictor on your insides.

“I ain't ever seen an android as beautiful as you,” said the driver, eyes in constant motion from the mirror to the road. “What model are ya? Definitely not a four or five. Yer a little too smooth to be a six. Damn, did Hyperion release a new one already?”

Elio held a polite smile, separate from the gentle, intimate ones that he kept for you. You didn't hear the response he gave to the cabbie because you felt his fingers reach through yours, pulling them apart so you couldn't dig a nail into the corner seam of your thumb anymore.

You spent the rest of the trip testing the weight of his hand, thinking of little less except how deep you'd have to go through his skin to see his circuitry and what else made him up. Those vanished like a white puff of breath in winter when the taxi jerked to a stop on a street curb.

“Thank yew for ya business.” The cabbie lifted his stiff old hat when you paid, eyed Elio a little more, and only drove off after you had knocked on a canary-yellow door up some stone stairs.

You stared at a decorative wreath covered with flowers—fake because the ones used couldn’t grow outside of greenhouses anymore—hanging dead center on the door. No doubt Marcos’ work because Mother couldn't be bothered with those little nuanced social things.

Marcos answered—brown skin and hazel eyes that burnished green in almost any lighting—gesturing for you and Elio to come inside.

“Welcome home,” he said, far more unnaturally than it sounded coming from Elio. There was a certain rigidity to it, an effort clearly inhuman and lesser. He embraced you in a familiar way, reminding you of all your years of childhood doing this exact thing because your mother didn't know how to love you, and “father” was just a word. “I apologize for messaging you to come over so late. You know how your mother is. When the mood strikes…”

Marcos didn't emit much bodily warmth, never had, even in the golden years of G3, but he was there, and that's all that mattered at the time. His skin was still youthful and flawless, though the longer you looked him in the face, the less real he seemed. His eyes held depth and movement though were slow, less precise, and duller. The lines around his mouth when he smiled were unnatural, appearing to you nearly like bunching folds in a sheet of leather.

It was strange seeing an older generation of android after having acclimated to Elio over two months.

“Your mother is at the dining table.” Marcos moved on to Elio, taking in his image, surmising that he too was an android. He glanced down at the bags that Elio still held. “May I take those for you? Hyperion’s innovation continues ever forward, I see. You are new.”

“The first of Generation Seven,” said Elio. The bags were passed between them. “I would appreciate it if you kept the duck refrigerated. It's in the paper bag.”

“That's no trouble.” Marcos turned with Elio following along behind him into the kitchen. “I'd like to hear about Generation Seven’s potential. What is your maximum I-O? Data? Memory? How have the functions that have been implemented into you differ from Generation Six?”

Their voices were muffled behind the walls as you crossed through multiple rooms to where Mother sat at the head of a large glossy table made from dark-brown wood. It was a spacious area reserved to eat surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows in elegant drapes with the best view of whatever the neighbors were doing. She had told you once that the only reason she bought this house was because it'd be good gossip for when she invited her gaggle of catty executive receptionist friends over.

Back then, she hosted her little impromptu get-togethers more often than she remembered to see you off to school. Marcos made sure you were fed and bathed, sat with you in your bedroom to help with homework, and sent you to bed. As you grew, the parties had migrated elsewhere, prompting your mother to go with them.

That had left you alone with Marcos and the boundaryless curiosity of a teenager. You didn't know if Mother still participated in such things now that she was older, less pretty, inclined to more body aches.

“I've been thinking that we should visit the new teahouse that opened up on Aflaat Ave. You never talk to me anymore.” she said, but it wasn't true. Neither of you talked to one another, just used Marcos as an intermediate. “I—well—Marcos went through your old bedroom a few weeks ago because I've decided to take up scrapbooking and sewing and needed space, and he found an old shoebox full of your primary and secondary school projects! How quaint! He wanted to make sure you got them.”

“That's nice.” You didn't want to sit down, unwilling to be her fifteen minutes of entertainment before she got bored. She kept on staring at you with wide eyes and crow’s feet and fretful hands, like a woman who still had more to say. “I'll make sure Elio grabs them before we leave.”

“Elio!” Mother gaped. “Man or android? Certainly an android, right? Men are useless.”

Your rage was already bunching up and throbbing in the back of your throat. “Yes, Mother, an android.”

“‘Mother’ sounds so harsh! How about mama or mummy or mom?” She kept wringing her fingers together. “Anyway, anyway! Elio! He sounds so handsome. Is that who Marcos is talking to? What a handsome voice! Is he a Generation Six?”

You still hadn't sat down, though you used your hands to lean across the back of a chair. “Generation Seven. I'm testing him for Hyperion.”

“For Hyperon!” Mother couldn't fathom you doing more than grunt work at the marketing firm. She didn't know your position had become obsolete. “This is certainly a surprise. Sit down. How did that happen? You and Hyperion? Are you trying to make me look stupid?”

“I've been sitting all day. I'm good like this.” That wasn't a lie. You also just couldn't stand the idea of giving any relief to her anxious state. “It's my new job. Very coveted. I've been working closely with one of the researchers there, and he can't praise me enough. I'm looking after Elio for a year and then moving on to their next latest and greatest.”

“You?” She spat out a laugh. It calmed the trembling in her hands for a few seconds before she was back at it again. “Oh, my. Well. If that's the case, you certainly owe it to me for getting that job. My genetics. My smarts. You certainly didn't get it from your father.”

That lurching, angry ball in your throat was rising up fast. It was just there on the tongue making you gag, salivate, and begin to drool a bit from the corner of your lips. It tasted horrific and filled you with the most voracious need for venom.

“Who is my father?” you asked. “You could be wrong.”

Mother suddenly grew uncomfortable, flattening her gaze with the tabletop. Historically, she had always been this way when you asked about him, the infamously evasive ghost of your life. It was also the only thing that ever made her shut up.

“That doesn't matter.” She continued, “You’ve always had me and Marcos. That's what matters.”

“I've had Marcos.” The ball freed itself. “I just thought you should know, Generation Three models are being decommissioned. Marcos won't be receiving any more updates, and eventually, he'll just be a pile of fucking scrap. What're you gonna do then? You can't afford another android because you've sunk every penny you've ever saved into him—his upgrades, his maintenance, his clothes. It may take about ten years, and you'll probably be on your deathbed, but he's going to fall apart and eventually stop moving. You'll be just as alone as you were before he came along.”

Mother’s face turned shades, petrified. You wanted nothing more than to see her shrink into her clothes and disappear for good. It soothed you to think about Marcos’ end being inevitable, unchangeable, a fact. Some of the guilt was easier to bury that way.

“Wh-What are you saying to me, you awful child?!” She wailed with watery eyes, hands wrapped in the same colored strands of hair you had. “How could you?! That's not true! That’s not true! Do you know how hard it was to carry you for nine months?! I was so young and I was forced to give birth to you! Forced! Do you hear me—forced to be a mother to a child I never wanted! It was that or death. I never wanted a child because they turn on you and say things like this! You horrible, horrible child!”

Her shrieks stirred a ruckus from the kitchen where Marcos and Elio emerged from. Marcos ran to your mother, took her in his arms, and cradled her against his chest when she began to shed very real tears that bubbled at the corner of her eyes before falling, curving along her cheeks.

Elio came straight to you, hesitating to put his hands on your body, maybe noticing how viciously you glared at this wilted woman he'd yet to meet.

“Get the groceries. We're gone.” You stormed straight for the door, chest stuttering with heavy breaths you tried to calm because you knew what came next. Your throat ached, burned fiercely like something had snagged there and you needed to claw it out.

Once you reentered the chilly air submerged in all the dark and light of Retro City at night, it didn't matter that you were crying. They were hot tears that left behind cool traces. They were decades of disappointment, of secretly understanding a mother’s love would always be conditional, of being unwanted and wishing you hadn't been burdened with existing.

Elio came out minutes later, the door closing softly and locking after him. You heard the bags crinkle near you, drawing your eyes away from a blinking parking meter you'd zoned in to calm yourself down.

You said nothing.

“Let’s go home.” Elio hailed a cab idling nearby and opened the door for you. “I want to keep the meat fresh.”

Him and that stupid duck.

This cabbie looked back at you both once to get directions, and then only occasionally afterward, casting pitiable glances at your raw-looking face in the mirror. The GPS displayed on the car’s dashboard showed the apartment was thirty minutes away because of traffic, probably from a crash they were detouring; ordinarily, it only took twenty minutes.

When your pocket vibrated, you almost didn't check. Unsurprisingly, it was a message from Marcos, just a single one.

“I don't think you should come around for a while,” it read. You didn't respond. Nothing new. Some sort of falling out with your mother was routine. You couldn't understand why she thought it'd ever go differently.

However, this time wasn't like all the rest. This time, you’d said something unforgivable despite her doing the same, but yours was worse in her mind. You didn't mind the idea of her disappearing from your life. It was harder to handle the thought that you'd never see Marcos again before he ceased to function, though.

“What happened?” Elio asked, a weird departure from androids being programmed, traditionally, never to pry. “That woman was your mother, correct? What did you say to her?”

“Who cares?” You grunted, sniffing around the burn in sinuses again. “She's a crazy bitch. She's always been that way. I told her that Marcos would just turn into a scrap heap eventually. Was that wrong of me?”

“Well, perhaps that phrasing was inappropriate, yes.” Elio touched your forearm. “But there is no NDA in place from Hyperion. You are well within your rights to have told her. But, as I said, your phrasing—”

“I know, shut up—” You moved closer so you could lean against him. “I hate that woman. I hate my mother more than I ever hated anyone.”

Elio lifted an arm above you, giving you room to slide in as far as you wanted to go. He held you for the first time, repeating long, weighty strokes down your back, through his coat that you still wore. You were transported back to a moment in time steeped in cloudy nostalgia, blurred.

It was Marcos kneeling at your bedside, yellow overhead lights dimmed to nearly full darkness. The door was shut because otherwise a heap of cackling voices, Mother and her gossiping hens after too much wine, would spear in through the cracks and make you petulant. Marcos had already been trying to get you to sleep for over an hour.

“Sleep little one, sleep.” Marcos had said, voicebox in his throat straining with a quieter sound. “I know it must be difficult. You must be rested for school tomorrow.”

“They're too loud.” you whined, throwing your covers back with a great flourish, feet kicking them the rest of the way off before you huffed and turned to your side away from Marcos. “Make them shut up! Can't you make them shut up, Marcos?!”

He sighed, defeated as much as an android could be. No, he could not. It went against his programming to disobey his master—any human who made a demand of him. His order was to get the child to sleep, and that had yet to happen.

“Would you like me to read The Falcon and the Hare to you again?” It was your favorite bedtime story right now. Hearing fictional stories involving extinct animals seemed to be of odd fascination to you. “My tone of voice might make it—”

“No!” you fussed, thumping your feet once, twice, three times and going limp again. “Come up here until I fall asleep. Please?”

Marcos nodded. “Yes, little one.”

He had to keep one leg off the bed to even half fit on the mattress. You sat upright to fix the blankets so to cover yourself and part of Marcos’ one bent knee. His arm laid out on the bed, waiting for you to crawl into it until you were nestled into his side, sucking up what small warmth radiated from his fake body. Once you found a comfortable spot, curled up tightly much like a cat sunbathing in a single shaft of daylight, he began smoothing a hand down along your back, heavy enough to be felt through your thick comforter.

You listened to him hum a song that you liked, one that translated well to his chords and the vibrations in his throat.

He hummed. He petted your back. He hummed. He petted your back. He hummed…

“Do you truly hate your mother?” Elio’s voice was delicate just then, aware that you were away in some reverie he tried to gently lure you out of. The dream was over. That one silver glimmer of your childhood became far away, forgotten while the sounds of the city rushed back into the cab.

“Yes—I mean, I dunno.” You actually yawned, pushing one of your eyes with the heel of your hand. “I think I hate her. We've argued my entire life. We've never gotten along. Yeah, I hate her.”

Elio was holding you by the waist now. “Is that why you said what you did?”

“Said what?” You were a little too keen on his thumb swirling around the fat padding your hip bone.

“About Marcos being scrap…”

“Elio, seriously? Do you ever shut up?” It was tempting to put yourself on the opposite side of the seat, but you didn't want to give the cabbie any chance to eyeball him. “I—I don't know. She just gets me so mad. I used to be able to crush up those feelings because Marcos told me it wasn't healthy to act on them. But, then, I moved out, and I realized she was still the same, that she'd always stay the same. I stopped hiding it.”

You were so close to his face that you could see how long his eyelashes were and the shadows they cast on his cheeks.

You looked into his eyes. “I wanted to make her hurt as much as she hurt me.”

▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃

Midnight had come and gone before you finally gave up on trying to sleep. You spent the better part of an hour staring up at the high ceiling, imagining every rusting pipe you saw as immobile serpents stretched taut to make the interconnecting structure that sprawled across the entire loft. Swirls and shapes and blacker-than-black shadows danced in front of your eyes, twisted with the pipes, and made the usual knocking sounds within them, but nothing ever came for you.

Downstairs was a careful amount of liveliness and aromas as Elio put together his duck à l'orange that he promised you. You scarcely heard a sound from him shuffling about but more from the clanking pans, boiling pots, and unintelligible chatter you knew came from the television.

Maybe he was watching a rerun of Wendy Carmichael Can Cook again, maybe a segment from the news because he liked that equally as much.

And yet, as you made your way to the lower floor, mystified by the fact you were standing on your toes to disguise all sound during your descent, you saw that the television was set to an old crime show he watched with you on occasion.

Detective Georgina Reyes and her android sidekick, Regis (G5), were the undisputed heroes of Helcam City and solved every case that came their way with style, finesse, and plenty of moral and ethical dilemmas. The majority of the show was spent within Georgina's inner world and her near-obsessive lust over Regis, who was owned by the department chief.

Ratings for the show had climbed to an all-time high when Regis had gained a sense of self and the ability to defy his programming. For fewer than six episodes, it was complete bliss for fans of Georgina and Regis, but then the season five finale happened—

“Can't sleep?” Elio asked, effectively putting your heart in your asshole, sending your soul skyward. He must have gauged your sudden gray pallor and bulbous glare because he smiled apologetically from the bottom of the stairway. “I'm sorry. I didn't intend to scare you. Were you watching Regis and Reyes?”

“I—uh, no.” You sighed, taking slow steps to the bottom to ease your heartbeat eating away at your ribs. “I was thinking about the show ending. Have you watched it yet?”

“Of course,” he said. “It was a peculiar way for the story to end. In my opinion, it was incomplete. Very sudden. It's my understanding that there was an issue with how the government was being represented within the show, and a few of the writers were accused of conspiracy to defraud the government and subsequently arrested for it.”

“Seriously?” You scoffed, making it to ground level, and walked around Elio toward the kitchen where all the heavenly smells wrapped around you, enticing you to take a morsel. “It was the forced pregnancy plotline, right? Creepy stuff.”

“Indeed.”

Elio wouldn't let you have any of the duck à l’orange, saying it was meant for your dinner later on in the day, but he did steep you a hot mug of herbal tea (for sleep), the one that turned water pink, and offered to make you a light snack.

He went back to his tasks after you declined, satisfied well enough with the small swigs you took from your white mug. You spent more time sitting at the counter in silence, watching his back, hoping to gain the power to see through his shirt rather than actually taking interest in what he was doing.

Your eyelids fluttered and fell thinking about the car ride home: his arm around you, his thumb rubbing pacifying circles into your hip, how you'd been close enough to his face to believe you felt a breath leave his lips.

“Elio.”

“Yes?”

He had moved on to washing dishes. When he heard you behind him, he took a clean towel to his hands and quickly dried them before facing you. You guessed you probably had a strange expression right now, or at least, looked at him in a way you never had because the towel was cast aside, draped over the faucet, and his eyes flickered across your face.

“Your heart rate and body temperature have increased.” he said, giving into the pull of your hands after grabbing both sides of his face. You backed yourself into the countertop while still holding him, thumbs caressing the rise of his cheeks, bringing him down, down, down toward your face where you certainly felt heat blow across your mouth. “Your breathing has changed. I can hear your heartbeat. Don't be anxious. I won't hurt you.”

You weren't nervous.

You proved it by kissing him, full-bodied, slow, lingering. He gripped the edge of the countertop, bracing his weight against his hands to stifle some aggressive reaction, possibly, and returned the kiss with just as much fervor that you put into it.

His lips were every bit of what you imagined, what you wanted them to be. You had the urge to bite into them a little, to see if they could bleed the same way yours could when you chewed enough on loose skin. Their texture was slightly indented with cracks that gave friction to the moist smear across your mouth.

Although the sounds of the kitchen and ambient hum from the television in the next room stayed as they were, it was like the volume of everything had been set to mute, and only the breathy, wet pops of air and skin made it into your ears. You heard the delicate chatter of teeth inside your head when his mouth roamed the underside of your jaw, down your neck, to the rise of your clavicle, stopping only at where your neckline ended.

His hands had already made home under your clothes, first doing away with your shirt that he tossed over your shoulder onto one of the barstools. Next, he worked on the elastic waistband keeping your sweatpants on your hips. You flinched against his hands when they splayed across your ass, taking all he could in them while his lips continued a downward trajectory, traveling over your breastbone, along the curve of your navel, and then he stopped.

Elio had been on his knees for a while, stirring you so deeply that you had no doubt there'd be damp spots sitting inside your sweatpants, possibly even drying on the inside of your thighs by now. He helped you out of your pants one leg hole at a time while you used his broad shoulders to balance yourself. And soon enough, one of your thighs was hiked up in that same spot, his face hidden from you despite all the work he was doing to well up a hard knot in your abdomen.

You had to take a fistful of his hair and wrap it tight in your fingers, using your other arm to balance against the counter. He wouldn't let you fall, you knew that, but the unsteadiness of your legs grew, trembling violently, turning to lead like being buried under concrete or suctioned by water. He kissed and sucked and stroked you some more, pushing more into the spots that made you moan the loudest and fastest, fingers wandering you busily and lubricated with your own spend.

“Elio—Elio, let's move somewhere, please.” You shuddered out, trying to pull his hair, shove his face off of you. “Please.”

He grunted, surprising you by relinquishing to the pressure, and made his way back up the route he had taken down. “Where do you want to go?” he asked, lips sticking on your throat, rising higher to the protrusion of your chin. “The kitchen floor? The couch? The bed? We could probably manage in the bathtub as well, if that's what you'd enjoy.”

“I don't care.” You were only half-honest and miserable now with the sole focus of trying not to touch yourself to finish. “Just… somewhere, Elio.”

“As you wish.”

Elio hoisted you onto his hips, making sure you knew to squeeze him with your thighs before making his way around the kitchen to turn knobs and shut off the overhead bulbs. The new darkness was refreshing yet did nothing to tame that sweltering sensation between your legs. In fact, you thought you could burst from the anticipation. It was everything you could do not to hump him through his clothes, hands occupied in his tousled hair, lips together with bruising force.

Before long, your back was on couch cushions and the television was off so as to not ruin the moment. You saw dark behind your eyes while you kept them open, unfocused on the ceiling with the serpent pipes because his mouth was already back on you and helping you chase that high.

“You're almost there.” His lips smacked against your engorged skin, making your lashes flutter and eyes roll back. “You look so perfect. When you cum, I'll take my time cleaning you up. I can use my tongue. I can make you cum again—as many times as you'd like.”

His arms held your thighs wide open, giving him all the room he needed for those final, well-placed strokes that turned your moans into utterly drawn-out, lewd things that made you grateful that no one else lived in this side of the building. Your body wrenched against his continued ministrations, his lips and chin and fingers warm and glistening with your traces.

You had thought to worry, briefly, about something getting onto the cushions under your ass, but Elio had already thought it through and used the dish towel from earlier to catch anything awry.

It came in handy for his face.

“How do you feel?” he asked from inside one of your thighs, kissing his way all the way to the point of your knee. “Was it satisfactory?”

You didn't answer right away, especially not when he came forward on his arms to catch your lips, slowing things down so you could bask in that fuzzy, satiated afterglow—dopamine and oxytocin being that remarkable duo doing their damndest to reinforce how exquisite and ineffably breathtaking Elio was to you.

“Would you like a bath?” he asked against your jaw. “You can just lie back and relax. I'll clean you up.”

“No.” Spurred by newfound bravery, you trailed your fingertips between both bodies, first to loosen the tie on his sleep pants, plucking the strings hard so he felt it. Next thing, your hands slipped under his shirt. “I want you to actually fuck me. Put your cock in me.”

Elio jolted upright, using the tall back of the couch and armrest near your head to hold his body above you. Cold air seeped in all the places where he had been, dotting your skin in gooseflesh, hairs within those follicles standing on end. You were laid out below him, showing all your unobscured nudity and vulnerability, withering yourself just a little smaller under the intensity of his stare.

This was different from the grocery store, where he had needed a moment to amend for information he did not have. This was something else—flickers of conflict, struggle, restraint, and excitement were ablaze in his eyes, which shifted around within their sockets, giving you glimpses of pure gleaming white, which stood out in the inky dark all around.

“I—are you certain that's what you want?” he spoke at last, doing little to alleviate the way you felt he had seen your insides and bones. “It is late, I know you must be tired.”

“Are you…” You couldn't really explain the uneasiness gnawing at your gut, nor the thrill of wanting him inside of you regardless. Maybe he could fuck the feeling out of you, bring peace to your throbbing heartbeat and blood gushing to your head. “Elio, are you telling me no?”

“I cannot do such a thing.” he said right away, coming down from his high place to lay the weight of himself across you.

You felt his skin flush to your chest without a thin shirt to hide his shape and muscle that wasn't real, but this was so much more than touching every dissected mannequin in physiology class in school. They couldn't kiss your neck while the interwoven, complex network underneath stretched, elastic flesh contracted and relaxed against your palms.

“Would you believe me if I told you there are certain functions—programming—that I cannot override?” The waistband of his pants collected in a heap of fabric around his knees, freeing room for his cock in the open air. “I won't be able to let you go until I'm finished. I want you to understand that.”

That sounded hot, and you were tired of him stalling, so you told him you understood. “Very well.” He kissed you, guiding one of your hands low to his core where you could revel in the size of him.

He was hard in your grip with a good girth and length to him, a curve you'd come to recognize from toys collected over the past decade to hit the right spots. The skin over his cock was much a part of him as the rest on his body, hot, growing damp, and sticky the nearer you wandered to the head.

You had watched old pornography with Melby and the group a few times before from the days when it was just humans performing acts on each other. No one really liked it because it was so dramatized; everyone agreed that one of the actors needed to be an android for it to actually be sexy. You never told them that the moaning men with stuttering hips as they ejaculated was something you did like.

Elio leaned into your palm, the thumbprint starting to prune as you rubbed his tip. More warmth seeped out from it, wet and thick and perplexing and exhilarating because Hyperion made him so perfect, a better being than just an emulation of man.

His cock slid through your hand in short, quick bursts that eventually lubricated his entire shaft. He'd kept himself busy on your lips, tongue in your mouth, swiveling together the taste of you with saliva. It was the most inelegant he had been with you so far, yet you didn't think you'd be bothered if he did this more often.

“Fuck me.” You whined, finally apart from him. The swollen head of his cock made a moist path along your core where you massaged it against every sensitive spot that set your senses into a blazing frenzy. “Be as rough as you want. Hurt me a little.”

He finally took your hand away, rearranging your legs so one laid across the back of the couch, the other on his hip with a knee shoved under your ass for height.

“I will not hurt you.” Both your wrists were cuffed by his large hands, pinned down into the cushions by your head. “But, I cannot let you go. You must see it through until the end.”

“Fuck. Me.” you said forcefully, uncomprehending to the things he was telling you, uncaring what it all meant.

“Yes. Alright.”

Elio obeyed you as he was supposed to, cock sinking in with care, thrusts starting out shallow until the tip was withdrawn and then back inside again. The angle he had created for you made it easier to take his length. It took a little more time to acclimate to his girth and plenty of gentle encouragement from his voice landing right next to your ear, telling you to relax. It would improve in a few minutes, and he wouldn't let you go to sleep dissatisfied.

Indeed, minutes later, you were well beyond the worst of it and filling the void all around you with harsh, rapturous moans, which Elio enjoyed hearing. His lips lingered at your throat where most of your sounds resonated, fists still holding firm around your wrists, knuckles the same color as the rest of the dark but had actually bled pale.

The springs within the couch cried out, unused to this weight and ruthlessness, while the air stung with cracks of slapping skin timed with your moans. Elio didn't let you move from where he had you laid out, didn't let up on the speed and depth he reached despite how labored your breaths became, broken words eclipsed by panting and his tongue forcing them back down your throat where they stayed in submission.

It was still cold in the early mornings this spring, often leaving your apartment a little less comfortable than you'd like, but right now, you could've been convinced that he was fucking you on the ground in the flatlands and believed it. Your skin was slick with sweat, the mess between your bodies slippery and undoubtedly staining the couch underneath.

Just then, the weight on your wrists climbed higher to your hands. He threaded your fingers together at the same time his thrusts began to slow, hips rolling yours like a swaying ship amid languid seas.

The whole time he had been on top of you, edging you closer to another orgasm, he had hardly made a noise apart from whispering in your ear when you'd clench his cock too tight. Now, he was failing to keep quiet from your neck, trembling and grunting on your skin until, at last, one jarring thrust left him breathing out in relief.

He got you to your end shortly after, half-hard cock still throbbing and warm inside you, giving just enough of what you needed while his hand finished the rest with fast strokes. You winced. He didn't let off until your jaw hung slack, whimpering meagerly through the pleasure hampering thoughts and sensations other than pressure releasing from your groin, spend turning a patch of your couch dark.

“You did well.” Once he was soft, he tied his pants back around his waist and picked up the sodden dish towel to begin cleaning around your sorest areas. “Come with me. I'll start you a hot bath and make you a new cup of tea before bed.”

You didn't want to get up from that spot, declared yourself rooted there unless Elio helped you up, and thrust a hand high into the dark room.

He wore a princely smile, you assumed, as he leaned down to pick you up in his arms instead. Moved by such a gesture, you reached for his face with your angry wrists and hands to kiss him all the way to the bathroom.

None of this made it into your next report.

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Melby didn't like Elio.

This she had told you over text after you declined her incoming phone call so as to not arouse Researcher Kim’s ire in finding out you were completely distracted during his exorbitantly detailed analysis of your latest reports. Two had been sent in before midnight last Sunday, as usual, since he was rarely satisfied with what you revealed through them these days.

Less than an hour later, while cozied up in bed on your side, facing the chopping blades of an oscillating fan, just beginning to feel yourself teeter off that edge from dull, relaxed awareness into light sleep, your ringtone went off—it was Kim.

“What else have you committed to doing lately in terms of Elio's social advancement? The last thing I have here…” A refreshing, fast pause followed, accented by the sound of paper softly swishing as it was parsed. “He was brought to a movie theater on the twenty-fourth, Diosyn Park on the twenty-ninth, Henrietta's four times in the last week. That's not nearly enough. Who are you socializing him with? What have their reactions been? How has he reacted to them? You're not writing down exact times.”

Not once since you'd joined the video conference forty minutes ago did he check to see if you were listening to him, content with his nose being shoved down into a bundle of chemically smelling papers and glowing screens to corroborate previous work he had on file.

That made it easier for you to text back Melby, arguing with her in endless paragraphs too tiring for your thumbs to continuously scroll through that you didn't have time to meet up at Clamors for drinks with everyone.

“Should I tell Chima you hate us?” texted Melby.

Truthfully, you couldn't tell if it was meant as a threat or if she was just pettish after being refused. One of her worst qualities, never spoken aloud to her face lest she fumbled and blubbered all the way to Chima to snitch about it, was being horridly uncompromising to just about everything.

It made you anxious enough that your fingers started to ache with an urge, on the path toward curling back slithers of cuticle, gathering blood under the nails, itchy scabs that Elio constantly covered with neon bandaids so you wouldn't touch them.

Eventually, you found a new fixation with the seams of your knuckles and fitted the most unrefined part of your nails into them, digging up red that way until he had to cover those, too.

It took you ten minutes with fidgety thumbs to reply. “I don't hate anyone. You know me.”

Melby's was instantaneous. “What about me? Do you hate me now?”

Another one. “Now that you have that android?”

More. “We used to spend so much time together.”

Last one for good measure to effectively drill a gory black hole straight into your pounding, cowardly heart. In her eyes, anyway. “I haven't seen you in months!”

“He needs more direct interaction. I've decided that I'll make amends to the template you've been using up until now.” Researcher Kim was saying, not seeing you, not hearing you, assuming your loyalty to him and his cause was complete.

Ripples of drowsiness overcame you so powerfully that you left Melby on read, mind suddenly a vast, empty space and quiet for the first moment all day. Your hands rose to cradle your cheeks, propping your head above your elbows on the countertop because Kim's inflated droning had come to have that effect on you over time.

A human man with a face that nice shouldn't be allowed to talk so much. He should go back to moaning on couches in front of cameras and sweltering lights.

“Let me explain what I'm currently changing.” he said, hopelessly invested in whatever those alterations were just by the mechanical click-clack of fingertips soaring over a keyboard somewhere low and out of sight of his screen. “From here on out, I'm going to require that you gather between six to ten direct interactions. I want full disclosure of every conversation, transcribed or recorded. From my standpoint, recording would be the most effective method so I may make interpretations myself.”

You were thinking of what to ask Elio to make you for lunch. It was almost noon. You unmuted the call. “Am I allowed to just randomly record people talking like that? That seems…”

“Hyperion works closely with Retro City’s governing bodies, and by extension, so do you.” Kim kept typing as he spoke. “It isn't illegal because the information you're collecting is imperative to the Hyperion Project. Without it, we face the risk of progress slowing or diminishing. That cannot happen, and I cannot emphasize enough that your work as an auditor must come before other commitments.”

At long last, he pulled his face out of papers and other screens to look at yours. In a fashion unsuitable for him, he sighed in a fatigued way, back collapsing against his ergonomic chair, shoulders lopsided with how he perched his elbows on the armrests.

“Retro City has over three million inhabitants. You won't have any issues finding people for Elio to speak to.” he told you. “Six to ten for each report. That’s all.”

You were already back in your messages, backtracking your previous responses to Melby, asking her what time everyone was meeting at Clamors.

Right away, “Come at nine!”

And then, “I'll save you a seat.”

Finally, “Don't eat too much before getting here. It'll ruin the fun.”

“Fine.” Phone now face down on the counter, you returned Researcher Kim’s concentrated stare. “I'll do my best. Six to ten. Six to ten…”

That had done well to appease him, demonstrated through a satisfied smile, which pulled his lips just enough that the muscles in his right cheek twitched as though the motion was foreign to him. With how inexpressive he was most of the time, you weren't surprised, thinking it more humorous than anything else.

You struggled to find a smile of your own that wasn't strained, though.

“That reminds me—” He positioned himself forward, arms on his polished dark-red desk with a curious gleam in his black eyes. “None of your reports have instances of copulation mentioned. Have there been complications?”

You sat stiffly, not agape but definitely not composed, either. “Sorry? What was that?”

“Intercourse. Sex.” He simplified it for you, almost with a pitying crease forming between his brows. “You've completed every other area outlined in the template except that one. I have… refrained from questioning you until now because I do understand that, outside of a clinical setting, it can be construed as inappropriate to discuss.”

The only person you had divulged any details to was Melby. Even that had been brief and inexplicit because she had immediately changed the topic to something one of the kids Chima invited into the group had done that pissed her off.

“Why do you need to know?” It was a defensive question. “Is that something I really need to write about? It's sex. It's just sex.”

Researcher Kim made an indistinguishable sound behind steepled fingers. They hid away whatever shape his mouth was in at that moment, making the whole conversation terribly uncomfortable. It was odd how exposed you felt like his stare was reaching long, further than just the screen in front of him. He wasn't looking into you or through you but rather right at you—imagining you some other way, unclothing your body with drifting eyes and invisible hands.

You were equal parts embarrassed and repulsed by that line of thinking, allowing your mind to summon up his ghost hands to search you, feel you under all your layers, know you as intimately as Elio had as though part of some extension of himself.

“It is all outlined in the contract you signed.” Kim said, now with an edge that made you flinch on the barstool. “Androids are developed for convenience and pleasure. I have reports for one, not the other. If Elio, as the first of G7, is not performing exceptionally—if there are complications, if he is defective—that is something you must include within your reports. I don't suspect that to be the case, in this situation.”

His eyes suddenly caught onto something else, going beyond you, but you chose not to react by looking. “Your work as an auditor has been sufficient so far, but incomplete reports at this critical stage in Elio's testing are grounds for me to terminate your contract.”

You clenched your jaw until your teeth throbbed, your head going up and down like it was on a hinge attached to your neck.

“Personally, that's a hassle I'd rather not involve myself in.” Kim confessed in a straighter posture, smiling tensely. “Now, I'll ask you again: Have there been any complications with inter—”

“That's enough.” Elio reached across your shoulder for the tablet, pointer finger hovering over a red button on the screen. “Researcher Kim, it's time for lunch. Goodbye.”

He pushed the button, managing to catch a swift change in Kim's expression before the screen went black and reflected your shock back at you instead.

You watched him slide the tablet away to the opposite end of the counter space, unable to lift yourself out of this bizarre stupor just from how purely surreal what just happened was. And from the look of it, Researcher Kim hadn't anticipated that Elio was capable of doing something like that, either.

You just hoped it wouldn't cost you your contract.

“What have you been doing all this time?” you asked, tilting your head back to welcome his lips gliding atop yours, a peck, at first, which gradually grew deeper and greedier. With some effort, you pulled back. “Mm, c'mon, what were you doing?”

“On Wendy Carmichael Can Cook today, she said—”

A hiss of annoyance. “Oh, of course…”

“She said there was a list of excellent bistros around Retro City worth trying.” He wasn't pleading with you or anything, but he seemed just about as dedicated to this idea as he had been with the duck à l’orange a while back. “For lunch, I thought it'd be of interest to you to visit one. I've been researching ones I thought you would like based off of your dietary habits, allergies, and sensitivities. Radiant Bistro next to the Leviathan Archway near downtown might be a good option. Impressively diverse menu.”

You pretended to pinch lint off of his shirt and inspect it up close. “If you didn't want to cook, you could've just said that.”

“That's not it,” he assured you with a kiss to the back of your hand so that you understood he meant it. “Since my arrival here, your social presence has declined substantially, which will not fare well for your public profile. I do understand that it’s in relation to your work as an auditor, but—”

“Okay! Okay, I get it.” you said agreeably, hands raised, hoping it'd deflect anything else. “We’ll go. Let me just find a hat so the sun won't get on my face.”

“No problem.” He walked away and came back with an old unbranded brown one from somewhere in the most remote crevice of the apartment. “Will this suffice?”

You looked at it, amazed. “Yeah. Yup. Let's go.”

Elio had stopped carrying a coat with him once the evenings grew long, and the remnants of heat from the day floated into nighttime, trapping the city within a muggy gray haze that too closely resembled dewy fog in early spring. The difference was the heaviness and breathability of the air—one you could tolerate despite allergies; the other was deplorable and evoked memories of every single club you had drunk and danced in with Melby and Chima and the rest in the past years.

Outside, right now, sucking in the early-afternoon heat into your lungs after spending your morning in air conditioning, nose wrapped in earthy white wisps rising from a coffee mug, you wanted to turn back around and hide. Much to your dismay, Elio kept you on a short leash with a tight grip on your hand, probably expecting you to have a change of heart.

  “Would you like for me to recall the menu and read it aloud to you?” he offered, situating his hand so his fingers crossed through yours, palms flush together. “They have fourteen types of sandwiches—hot and cold. Five of those are chicken, and five are of different meat varieties: lamb, cow, veal, goat, and yak, all claimed to be bred and raised and slaughtered in their warehouses. The last four sandwiches are…”

You listened passively without much commitment, especially in the back of the cab where there was no escape from anything. The AC was broken. The cabbie kept wiping sweat off his brow and sipped warm water. With the windows down, the outside air ripped inside the vehicle, nearly stealing the old hat off your head.

Elio went on to list desserts, thumb gently rolling circles on your sticky skin as if meant to keep you soothed.

“As long as I remember to eat light…” you murmured, remembering, glumly to yourself.

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Clamors was inside a three-story building on the north end of Retro City, about a ten-minute taxi ride to Mother’s brick-stone house, thirty minutes from Henrietta’s, forty minutes from your apartment, and farthest removed from the slums where congregations of profile delinquents and the unwanted were most dense.

Here in this part of the city, you were an imposter among manicured foliage, men and women and androids arrayed in trendy designer silhouettes that were protruding, sharp, and agonizing; sharks and whales of big business puffed cigars in front panoramic views of the cityscape from the highest skyscrapers. They could look down at the street from their window and see you, an ant scuttling meaninglessly.

This wasn't a place where you belonged, a feeling that never changed over time, even years later after Chima recruited you into his group and every night was a suffocating blur of sweaty, faceless bodies, explosive music, stomping feet, raspy screams, and lightly-flavored chalk dissolving under your tongue. You roamed the sidewalks at two in the morning as everyone had been kicked out, but no one cared because Chima came from money, a rare case where two parents could be accounted for, and you'd all just be back inside the next evening.

You weren't sure when you had become disillusioned with it all—the drinks, the animal pills, which coalesced into saliva in your mouth, the noises, the gossip, the six ibuprofen to function behind a desk at work, the burnout of rinse and repeat, a conveyor belt that moved cyclically without a place to get off. To exit the ride meant to plunge head-first into abject terror, the unknowable, to become part of the yellow wallpaper that's never actually seen, to cease to be.

Being back in Clamors again after months away turned your heart against you, thrust the sound of its distress into your ears, dwarfing an animated conversation happening right at your circular table. You felt the music vibrate through your skin, make its way into your marrow, and rattle your entire skeleton.

Melby had a hand on your knee, blunt-tipped nails collecting sweat off your skin underneath them.

You couldn't really focus on that.

“So, this is Elio. He's hot.” Chima said without looking at you.

“Really hot!”

“So hot!”

“Did you hear? Shut up, stop talking! Did you hear? That slut got herself pregnant!” shouted Niva, a senior-most part of the circle behind you and Melby. She knew everything about everyone, though she wasn't supposed to keep tabs. “Apparently her baby daddy decided the pussy wasn't worth it anymore and ran!”

“I can't believe it. That'd mean someone was actually willing to sleep with her.” said Niquan Lamos, the fashionable one always gravitating toward pastels. “A man, at that. Disgusting.”

Everyone laughed, including you. Elio quietly observed it all, seated at your side, incapable of letting his polite smile slip with numerous prowling eyes on him.

“Have you fucked him yet?” Chima asked you without actually caring for a response.

“Oh, have you fucked him?”

“C'mon, don't hide it. How was it?”

“What was her name?” asked a newcomer in the group, fresh out of secondary school and not even twenty. He was a compact lad, both in size and from being squeezed between Chima and Niquan in the circular booth stretched in fuchsia leather, or at least, that's how it looked in your table’s corner of the club. “How come she isn't here anymore?”

First rule was: Never talk about things that could make the liquor go down harder. This was one of those things. Secondly, never ask questions about people who the group was no longer associated with. It just sounded ugly to acknowledge the rejects.

Tonight, however, was an exception because Elio's presence was an exciting change. They forgot how to behave.

“Hm, now that you mention it, I don't remember. How long has it been?” Chima said this absently, abysmally black eyes wholly captivated by the android. “Damn. Something like Mi-dan? Mi-an? Mi… Mi…”

“Her name was Mi-sun.” said a nobody from somewhere at the round table. It probably would've been easy to figure out who was talking if they were more important, but it took less effort to blame the music reverberating from the speakers mounted on the wall near their heads.

Melby’s hand traveled adventurously along your thigh, unmindful of how close she came to your crotch. You had a harder time ignoring that move and sipped busily from your jungle bird, holding it higher than your eyeline to admire its beautiful vermilion hue practically glowing against the strobe lights pulsing down from the ceiling.

“This is the first time I've seen you drink.” Elio was leaned into you, wise to the fact that you wouldn't hear him any other way. His lips nearly touched your ear, voice honeyed, caring, all for you. You were halfway through your second jungle bird. “Please don't overdo it. The adverse effects of overconsumption of alcohol will cause you great discomfort tom—”

“Thank you, Elio.” For just a moment, you wondered how irreversibly damaging it would be to just grab his hand and sprint out of there. You drank some more to weaken your resolve, add lead into your legs. “I'll be good if you be good.”

Elio nodded appreciatively.

“Why was Mi-sun kicked out?” again asked the new face from before, plain and boyish-looking, Chima's fresh catch. They just kept getting younger and the alcohol just kept tasting worse. You forced it all down, anyway. “Well? Well? Well?”

“She was talking crazy shit,” Melby piped up with a drawl, fingernail swirling around a dark purple bruise on your thigh. She pushed in hard enough to remind you that it was still sore. “Like, she was fine one week and then every single night after that she would nooooot shut up about some wild government conspiracy theories.”

“Oh, right.” Chima laughed while forcing everybody out of their seats so he could stand. “I remember now. Yeah, she went completely insane. I think she was talking about androids being used for population control or something. Weird. Hey, let's dance.”

“That was a year ago?” Niva wanted Chima to confirm. “A year, right?”

“Over a year now. Who cares?” Melby said, staying put beside you while the rest of the booth vacated. “She’ll just end up dead in the slums like all the rest. Uh, they do all die, right?”

“Who cares?” Chima echoed, nesting his shoulders high to his ears in a shrug before walking away. “Who has the animal crackers?”

“Sounds about right.” Niva was unconvinced, doubt lingering in her words until Chima came around to rummage her purse for pills. “Oh! Only take one, they're so expensive!”

Chima stuck three in his mouth. “Don’t kill the vibe.” He left without a glance back toward all the no-face, nameless nobodies willing to lick the underside of his shoes if it meant they'd be acknowledged and given features—eyes, lips, hair, an identity.

Niquan was satisfied with just one, offering a subtle wash of relief to Niva, who was just about depleted of her supply at that point and used the last of it for herself, tongue lapping at the inside of her plastic envelope.

You were almost finished with your jungle bird, contemplating a third even though you had entered the territory where one more could mean the difference between a happy buzz and splintering headaches tomorrow, just as Elio warned. The ice cubes had melted into a smooth watercolor appearance and turned from red to blue to green to purple to pink as the lights gushed down from above.

“I don't remember what she looks like.” you admitted to Melby who gazed into you, squeezing your thigh meaningfully. Again, you didn't pay attention. “Mi-sun, I mean. Were we friends? Did I ever drink with her? Have I ever slept over at her house?”

“No!” Melby snapped, affronted. “You're mistaking her for me. You guys never even had a conversation. You hated her guts. You thought she was a freak.”

You made a sound into the last of your drink, unsure whether she was lying to you or not. “Maybe. Maybe. Was I okay with her being kicked out?”

“Totally.” she said, casting a fleeting look of disdain toward Elio, lip curling at one side. “Chima only counted yours and mine and Niva’s votes since we've been here the longest.”

“That's…” You licked your lips and then the rim of your glass, secretly wishing your tongue would snag an uneven crack so you’d start to bleed. “Why don't I remember anything?”

Melby giggled. “Because you've been drinking, babe. It'll come back to you. What animal cracker do you want tonight? Giraffe or cat?”

“Hm?” You were elsewhere.

Until now, you had gone numb to your surroundings thanks to the licorice notes of black strap rum and bitter Campari and pucker of pineapple juice that made for a mostly pleasant experience in your throat.

You were present in that moment, venturing a look around at the dance floor crammed with bodies (human and android) moving in rhythm to the music, in time with each other to create a oneness, a synchronism so strange that it put the hairs on the back of the neck on end like spines.

Why did it all look so different now? So alien? As if you were seeing an image from your nightmares in real life.

Elio failed to convince you not to have another drink brought to the table after all, meanwhile Melby said she was disappointed you didn't get something stronger, claiming you used to do it all the time.

That's right. You did, didn't you?

“Hey.” Chima had emerged from the shapeless cluster of sweating, drunk, wriggling bodies a short while later. He reached into the booth, gathering a fistful of Elio's button-up shirt, and looked at you with a malicious gleam, possibly just your imagination, that just dared you to protest. “I know you don't mind if I borrow him for a while, right? Of course not. The rest of us are curious about him. We’ll be gentle.”

You would’ve believed someone if they said your tongue was cut out, because as much as you wanted to slice into him and spit poison in his wounds with your words, rub it raw, deep into the bone, nothing came up.

Not a breath nor a feeble sob.

Don't touch him. Nothing.

“So, you're chill with it?” Chima, beautiful Chima with deep-dark skin sparkling in rhinestones and spray-on glitter as though he were a vessel for all the stars in the cosmos, bared his straight, white teeth at you in the form of an affable grin.

Eat shit. Bitter silence.

He asked you the same thing again but grew bored and gave up on expecting you to do anything interesting. Elio was led away by the front of his shirt to the amalgamation of bodies like a sacrifice for the great black maw belonging to an abomination.

A few broke away from the core. Niva and Niquan were identifiable since you'd known them longer. The rest were unfamiliar to you—the no names and the tiny young man, the android bartender, the disc jockey, the bodies climbing over each other and melting back into a single incoherent mass.

They all looked exactly the same.

“I wanna dance too, let's go!” Melby struggled with one of your arms while attempting to scoot her way out of the booth, but the alcohol and broodiness made your body into a stump, sturdy and immobile, roots bursting through the bottoms of your shoes and the shiny floor.

She plopped back down. “Seriously? What's up with you?”

“It's too hot,” you reasoned, sticking a fingernail into the fresh glass in front of you, swishing the liquid around to make everything a more palatable blend. “If you want to dance, I'm not stopping you.”

“You're acting so weird.” Melby said, lost somewhere between frustration and astonishment while pulling a clear baggy from her pants pocket. A couple small pills moved inside, pink residue clouding the plastic. She plucked out one without looking. “Hey, open up. You're being a huge snoozefest. This'll loosen you up.”

When you felt her acrylic fingernails press against the corner of your lips, you gently pushed her hand back and nursed your drink some more. “No thanks.”

Melby’s tongue lashed against her gums, sharp and disapproving. “Why are you being such a fucking buzzkill tonight?” She traced your line of sight to Elio, to the others grabbing and fondling him, to his eyes looking right back at you. “We haven't seen each other in months. Now all you do is stare at that android.”

“It's my job, Melby.” You took the damp paper napkin from under your drink to dab your forehead at the sweat, trying to cool yourself. “I can't help that.”

“You can take one night away from your job.” she decided, taking hold of your lower mandible with a claw and crammed the chalky pink pill through lips and teeth into the pocket underneath your tongue. “You know the drill. Let it dissolve all the way. Stop making faces! It doesn't taste that bad.”

You tried to jerk your head away, but her grip was surprisingly solid.

“Melby! What the hell?!” It came out garbled around her fingers still resting in your mouth, filling the reservoir below your tongue with saliva.

Melby, blue-eyed and blonde with pale pink skin that always reddened in the electrifying, hot air in the club, was completely flushed from her face down to her chest. Her eyes had darkened upon withdrawing her two fingers, glossing your lips with spittle.

“I missed you.” she said, outlining the shape of your mouth until the skin started to tingle. “Did you miss me? I've been really lonely.”

Your least favorite part of taking an animal cracker was the aftertaste that was the equivalent of eating sidewalk chalk and rubbing alcohol with a whisper of strawberry wafting up into your nostrils, clinging to every permeable membrane in your mouth and making your cheeks tremble.

“I—yeah. Yeah, I missed you.” You tried to sink the lingering taste down your throat with a swish and swallow from the jungle bird. “I didn't know what I was getting into with this whole Hyperion gig. I feel like I'm constantly watching Elio. Twenty-four seven.”

Elio never lost track of you throughout the ordeal, his being unable to escape the hands on his body and fight against the programming in his brain meant exclusively for human satisfaction. There were moments where you saw each other clearly, empty windows between writhing bodies, and you were convinced he tried to convey a very human-like discomfort that you immediately pretended like you hadn't seen.

Interfering meant going against the group. There was nothing you could do about it except allow them to eviscerate Elio if that's what they wanted. You could only sit there, drowning in rum and pineapple and aperitif and demerara sugar and scorching strobe lights and music bashing your skull and Melby unfastening buttons on your pants, but for some reason, that didn't quite register as what it was to you.

“Are you coming home with me tonight?” Melby asked so sweetly that it made your heart flutter, or maybe that was the pill taking effect. “We always have fun together. I've really missed it. It isn't the same without you.”

“What—” You almost tipped the red cocktail while reaching over it for a water glass that no one had touched. You slugged half in one go. “Wait. What are you even saying? I gotta take care of Elio.”

“Oh my god,” she seethed, taking her hand out of your pants to wipe her fingers on the napkin you used earlier. “Just tell him to leave. He has to listen to you. He’ll be okay.”

Fuzz had started to collect in your head, filling the entire dome with a warm, soft feeling that spread like a rapidly-growing fungus down the brainstem, coiled around your spine, stuffed your jaws with cotton, sucked all the moisture from your throat, widened your chest with stuff, and ignited kindling that had been sitting in the bottom of your stomach.

Just now, the deafening tone of music had been reduced to a throbbing bass that jarred your bones and pulsed in your hands and feet. Your vision wasn't much different than it had been before, only now you seemed to move at lightning speed, people and shapes and lights all confused watercolor smears of you shifted too quickly.

“Can't.” You recalled Melby had said something. “Elio, first. Do you see him?”

“No.” she said, watching Chima hook his fingers through the belt loops on Elio’s pants, knocking their pelvises together in time with the music. “Come on, I'll call a cab and we can go home. We’ll have a good time away from everyone.”

You made a grab for the water glass again, throat the driest it had ever been. A mistimed gasp came out when the rim of the glass struck your teeth, missing your mouth almost completely. Luckily, only a little water got on your shirt, molding it to your chest like a cold second skin.

“God, that's good,” you moaned, draining the rest of it. “What are you even talking about? A good time?”

She eyed you uneasily. “What do you mean? What do you remember when you're with me?”

“Pfft,” you scoffed, stealing yet another water glass you managed to grapple with two hands so it'd stop swaying. “What do you mean, what do I mean? I hit the pillow and I'm out. Why?”

After a few long swigs of ice water, the dance floor was less a mangled disarray of smoke and neon colors, more definitive and jagged—the stage, the speakers, the turntable where the disc jockey played. Even the beastly blob of grinding, convulsing people started looking like people.

Melby had lost all the red in her face, eyes riveted to the half-empty jungle juice in front of you, perhaps counting the beads of condensation dripping from its tall form.

“You're usually really talkative. I think you're lying to me right now to get out of it.”

“Huh?” You were done with the second water, staring at her unfocused but suspicious. “Lying about what?”

“I—” Melby withered in her seat, distracted by something ahead that you couldn't see, a bejeweled nail wedged between her teeth. “No, nothing. Never mind.”

“Whatever,” you murmured. “I'm outta here.”

Melby didn't stop you from leaving behind money for your drinks before you stumbled away from the booth toward the dancefloor, evading bodies that came flying toward you with erratic, jerky movements not at all matching the pounding beat coming from the stage.

The floor was actually hundreds of individually tinted blocks of plexiglass with colored bulbs screwed in underneath.

During the day, Clamors kept it covered with a special protectant and tarp to maintain the integrity of the glass, but at night, it was illuminated like a nonsensical rainbow checkerboard. Each square took on a life of its own, flickering in unison with songs played throughout the night, warping into mandalas and spirals and disorienting waves that most people using animal crackers couldn’t stomach for long.

You were close to vomiting up the jungle birds and your meager lunch from Radiant Bistro that afternoon when you found Elio within the swarm of partiers that reeked of sour body odor and stale alcohol.

He stood amid it all with a stiff spine, the loveliness of his face covered by shadows and terrible bursts of light that heightened his vacuous stare into the faces of those touching him.

The only other time you had seen him so devoid of life was in the presence of Researcher Kim. Now, he looked in such a way at Chima, at Niva, at Niquan—the nameless and the boy were too scared of overstepping to have a part in it yet straggled nearby to feel like they meant something.

Elio saw you jostling through the crowd toward him, hardened amber regaining luminosity. You became the center of his world again with just a look, yet your world was entirely unthawed ice and serrated stalactites growing ever sharper, heavier, closer to piercing and crushing at a single point below them. The forest of brittle minerals in your mind needed just a single resounding event to loosen, to fall, to impale indiscriminately.

That moment finally happened as you approached Chima, his hand stroking Elio under every layer meant to keep him out. Your future was a far-off thing, light years away and completely untouchable, no matter how many times you were threatened with your profile, how you'd become nothing without your associations, how the entire world would cringe in disgust at your existence and leave you to rot.

You took Chima's hand out of Elio’s pants, hoping you had the strength in yours to twist his wrist so it hurt, wanting nothing more than to actually shatter the bone with just the pure hatred surging down into your grip. With the other hand, you drew it high behind your shoulder, muscles tense, bone popping from an unnatural angle, dense club air gushing between your fingers right before your palm released a thunderous crack against his cheek that shot up the length of your arm in stinging ripples.

“No, stop!” Elio tore you away too late, right after weakness reentered your body, and he was able to easily restrain you. “What have you done?”

The clique had rallied around Chima, steadied him and examined the mark on his cheek, which was already blowing up in size.

He stared at you with amazement that quickly contorted into pure incandescence. His face was the ugliest thing you had ever seen, eyes an uninviting, pitless, and hollow place. This, you thought, was what he truly looked like beneath the popularity, cosmetics, money, and illusion of drugs.

“Keep your hands to yourself!” you screamed.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” He tried to lunge at you but was held back by Niva, Niquan, and various ghostly hands. “How dare you. How dare you touch me, you sad sack of shit! You ungrateful nobody! I can ruin you! I can make sure you get thrown into the slums and your fucking insides get ate out by all those filthy savages.”

“That's better than this.” You felt Elio tighten his arms around you, feet shuffling backward to try to separate you from this. Dancers were beginning to gather around the scene, both grossly fascinated and terrified because they'd never seen a fight between humans. “It's better than the stupid drugs. It's better than this club. It's better than all your shitty little followers. It’s better than you.”

To this, Chima stared wide-eyed and gave a derisive laugh. “You seriously hit me because I was touching the android? He's a fucking machine! What else is he useful for?!”

You were still being coaxed out of the gathering, Elio's lips whispering pacifying words into your ear that you didn't hear.

“Don't—Don’t talk about him like that.”

Chima’s visage relaxed into one you were used to seeing. A man who knew he had all the time and power in the world and that he could do anything with it. He swatted away all the helping hands and straightened his clothes.

“Not only are you fucking insane,” he said, smiling without remorse. “Now, you're also dead.”

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The decision to retch into a convenience store trash can happened because you couldn't bring yourself to do it in the neatly barbered bush you had been closer to at the time. You had separated the metal lid from the metal body so you could simply lean over and spew into it freely.

Smells emanating from inside—expedited food rottage from summer heat, curdled drinks, bagged-up dog shit, and God knows what else—did better to evacuate your stomach than the insane lighted floor in Clamors.

Most of what came up lacked the usual sourness, ran watery like a geyser of diluted red jungle bird with occasional chunks of undigested sandwich and probably everything from three days ago.

Elio wiped your face clean at every chance he got, those seldom moments where you could cough and catch your breath for just a few seconds before your stomach clenched and more climbed up your esophagus and exited your body. There wasn't much he could do apart from dab your skin and keep your clothes from the trajectory.

“Why?” Elio spoke sometime later once the waves of nausea had tapered to a degree where you could sit on a bench outside the convenience store and take a bottle of water he had ready for you. “Why did you do it?”

“Because—” you said, not bothering to finish after swigging and swishing and spitting the acrid taste that lingered on your tongue, between your teeth, and in the ridges of your gums. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get rid of it all. It stuck in your mouth like bitter tar. “Because.”

You went on to repeat the rinse and swish a few more times, ultimately tilting the bottle upside down to crush the cheap plastic in your fist so it gushed down on your head.

For a second, you imagined turning on a spigot to shock your scalp with cold water, flattening all your hair, pasting your clothes flush and translucent to your body like a second skin to peel away later.

The humid nighttime air was suddenly so much less oppressive than it had been. A subtle breeze had picked up throughout the course of the day, not doing much to tame the heat overall, but the fat pearls of water streaming down your back made you shiver. You counted all the drops that coalesced into shimmering beads on the tips of your hair, your eyelashes, and your nose and fell onto the pale gray cement underfoot.

Elio had already unbuttoned his shirt to the navel, just above where he had rebuckled his pants and tried to pull the rest of the fabric free.

“Oh, Elio. Don't.”

He pulled you into him despite your protest, swathing you from behind first with the shirt and then his arms as he held you against his chest. Fortunately, he had worn an airy undershirt so his body wasn't on display for anyone else, though there was no one around at this hour.

He soothed you with long strokes along your back. His touch amplified to a point where it hurt as much as it felt good. You knew what fingers he used more pressure with, where the heel of his hand touched you next. You could feel where he chose to linger and knead at knots under your skin, imagining the sensation similar to using a sharpened stone or ice pick

“I'm fucked.” you mumbled sullenly in his embrace, warmth dissipated as you had soaked his undershirt all the way through. “I'm so fucked.”

“It was unwise, yes,” he said in silken tones from atop your head, thin jaw pushed down into your wet hair, grinding and rotating when he'd speak. “I had you in my mind the entire time. I was prepared to let him do as he pleased if it meant preventing a confrontation—I failed. But, I hadn't expected you to hit him. None of the outcomes I calculated had that conclusion. I'm sorry.”

“No. I'm glad I did it.” You worried that you were being overconfident, too hopeful toward a future unraveling at your feet as you spoke. “I couldn’t stand how everyone was staring at you—touching you. Everything just felt so wrong, but, why? The only thing that was different was you being there, Elio. I saw you—you looked so uncomfortable. I was so hot. I think I was seeing things after taking the animal cracker. I just got so angry.”

Usually, Elio was the type to scavenge your history as thoroughly as he could, however minimal or inconsequential it all seemed to you at the time. It was a quintessential part of his programming as an android—of all androids—to want to dissect everything there was to know about their masters, knowing them better than their masters knew themselves.

You considered making it effortless for him, volunteering your past with animal crackers and how they used to not hurt at all. At one time, you could binge them for days without violent side effects that’d plague a normal person for weeks.

“There are no pharmacological benefits associated with their use,” was what you heard him say in your head, firm yet loving, melting into his sensual strokes tracing parallel along the length of your spine. “Prolonged use has been known to create perforations in the gastrointestinal tract, heart dysrhythmias…”

He didn't regurgitate that information at you. In fact, he said nothing at all. Besides the hand sweeping down your body steadily, lips and shapely nose burrowed in your limp seaweed-string hair, he didn't move at all. There was no stuttering heartbeat between you except your own. Even his breaths had gone still, chest straight down and unmoving.

Elio was a machine.

It was so easy to forget while wrapped up in daily mundanities. It wasn't so easy to forget in this moment where you wanted to crack him open, scoop out each precious piece of him with your bare hands, and hide yourself within his husk.

You were sick of the silence, so you pinched him hard under the arm, right next to the crease starting his shoulder. It made you feel better to do so, and he'd pay attention to you—

He hissed and reeled away from your touch, startling you out of his arms because you didn't know how else to react.

“Did you—Elio, did you feel that?” you asked incredulously, voice whittling into a self-conscious mumble once you realized the words leaving your mouth. They didn't stop. “Did that hurt you?”

The spot where you pinched was hard to see from the layer of his shirt sleeve, but his fingers rubbed there insistently like he were actually trying to alleviate pain.

“Once, during my early development, Researcher Kim had told me he wanted to close the gap between what people think separates androids and humans.” Elio explained, coming close again to touch you and dry your temples with his shirt on your back. “It's unlikely that what you perceive as pain and what I am programmed to perceive as pain are absolutely comparable, but there's some common ground.”

“I'm sorry, Elio. I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't know I could.” Your voice weakened to a whisper, throat clenched in shame as your skin grew hot. It was like you were still stuck in the throbbing, stiff air of the club and not in the spacious nighttime breeze.

He looked you in the face, almost-orange eyes flitting inside their orbital sockets trying to find something distant and unknown in your expression. You guessed he was assessing your sincerity—not for himself because he needed it, but to know how it took shape on you and bent your brows, molded your lips, dimpled your chin, deepened the lines.

Then he asked, "If I hadn't reacted—if my circuitry were less sensitive and I could feel nothing at all aside from your fingers on my skin, would you have done it again? Would you keep doing it?"

"What are you trying to say?”

"Globally, since the widespread distribution of androids, the occurrence of domestic and public disputes has been halved. I have been designed to be non-violent, as have all of my predecessors.” As if for effect, Elio took one of your hands and pushed your palm flat to his warm cheek. “I have no desire to hurt you, but I am also incapable of doing so.”

You couldn't wrench yourself from his grip, so that's how you remained, caressing his soft, smooth skin while your thumbpad skirted along the round bone below his eye.

This was more than you could handle right now. All of the illness and nausea that came with the burdensome summer heat, the animal cracker, every bit of liquid and food to enter your stomach, the memory of slapping Chima—it came back, crashing down like an avalanche carrying your regrets, fears, malaise.

“I'm not going to hit you.” You were gagging around saliva pooling into the front of your mouth. “Chima was different. He deserved it.”

“Perhaps,” Elio agreed, entwining fingers with the ones on his cheek. He kissed your open palm with great passion and some semblance of regret. “But, I wish you would have hit me instead. I have failed one of the most basic parts of programming by putting you and others in harm. You may now end up suffering greatly because of it.”

You did get sick again.

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Elio had persistently warded off Researcher Kim’s video calls for three days while you recovered upstairs beneath every comforter you owned, maximum air conditioning, and heavy curtains to shun out all natural light from ever reaching your bedside. Time came and went without peril or concept to you, seeming to evaporate into the air like nothing, much like how your steady, quiet breaths did the same. They simply came and went; inhale and exhale, no writhing white plumes drifted overhead to prove they belonged to you or that you were even alive. Not in the dead of summer.

  Five days total had passed before you could take the staircase down from the loft without Elio's assistance and eat or drink anything of substance that didn't end with it all being violently evacuated from your body.

Sleep remained elusive to you despite the sedatives and special hot tea recipes from online that Elio pushed down your throat. The migraines persisted even with prescription painkillers Melby had stolen for you forever ago and rough romps of sex that left you winded, glistening, and cold on the sheets when the oscillating fans blew air across your skin.

Whatever excuse Elio had fed to Researcher Kim over the days you were incapacitated worked because when you were finally back at the counter on a video call with him, he didn't ask you about it or chastise you much about the holes in your reports for that week.

“I see that Elio had been proving himself to be quite self-sufficient. I have here six separate occasions where he's ventured out on his own?” Kim looped a stylus through his fingers fluidly, concentrating on what little information he could glean from your submissions. “Henrietta's, mostly. I see he's had to visit the dry cleaners. General store. Pharmacy. He's also been completing the six to ten interactions by himself. Absolutely phenomenal!”

Your attention kept drifting away from Kim. It went to Elio, who placed a white mug down quietly next to you, the handle within reach of your fingers. Beyond the pale-gray wisps spiraling up into the air and dissipating among the snaking pipes sprawling the high ceiling, the liquid inside was pale yellow. Diluted green tea, maybe white tea, if you had to guess. They were among the few things you could stomach right now.

He offered you a fast smile, somewhat unlike himself, and leaned into your lips.

The sight went unnoticed by Kim, who was still captivated by the level of initiative and intelligence his creation displayed. Every word you managed to construct through sedative-induced delirium mesmerized him so thoroughly that he missed the groping hands under your shirt, the smothered moans, and the fact that you had exited view of the screen for fifteen minutes while being laid out on the couch and feasted on through an orgasm.

Wendy Carmichael Can Cook came on the television, a solid distraction for Elio. Today’s episode was a rerun featuring some sort of elevated mush dinner popular in the slums. With some canned foods capable of surviving nuclear fallout, herbs you were almost positive had gone extinct forty years ago, and spices so rare they were untouchable, Wendy concocted something truly groundbreaking to the audience’s eyes.

Elio looked only half-interested in the episode. Meanwhile, you went to the bathroom to clean yourself up and took three painkillers before sitting back down behind the counter. Researcher Kim had yet to lose the wind in his lungs, though now you weren't sure what he was talking about.

The tea was lukewarm and non-irritating just like you thought it'd be.

Your phone had survived the whole five days on a single charge as you had been too afraid to touch it, not because you were scared to see what was there but because you didn't want to know what was no longer there.

True to the fear, while holding a large breath you had sucked into your lungs, believing it to be the sturdiest barrier against whatever you'd discover, there was no one left in your phone log—except Melby.

The rest: Chima, Niva, Niquan, Marcos, Mother, and all the others who had once been listed there before like mock trophies to bolster your sense of worth, the swell of pride that came from knowing important people and integrating yourself into their lives to be something special, simply did not exist anymore.

You didn't have to search up your public profile to know that it was barren as well.

Once Chima went, everyone else went with him—both from the circle and those you'd networked throughout life. Even if it had been someone else, the end result would've stayed the same, exactly as it is now.

“What do you want? I'm not supposed to be talking to you.” Melby had answered her phone after six rings. The background seemed purposefully mute for your call. Perhaps she was just at home nursing the after-effects of things as well. “You there?”

Researcher Kim sieved through paperwork, now entranced by comparing Elio's earlier behaviors in the infancy of design to now. You lowered the volume to where his voice was a low hum, like mumbling through a wall you flattened yourself to.

“Let me guess, Chima told you that?” you said, sipping gingerly from your mug. “How much did he tell you? Was he actually honest, or did he just tell you I was fucking crazy?”

“You weren't acting right all night.” Melby countered in her surefooted drawl. “I don't understand what's happening to you, or why you've been acting so differently. You shouldn't have hit Chima.”

“He shouldn't have touched Elio.”

You could imagine her temper flaring, fair skin glowing pink in the face and chest as she kicked around the comforters on her bed. She strangled a sound in her throat that emanated through the phone as a low groan. Strands of her fried blonde hair scuffed together like pieces of straw when she scratched her head. It was unmistakable.

“What is going on with you?” she demanded, on the verge of tears, voice fading out in glimpses like she was moving away from the speaker. “Elio—he’s just an android. I know he's some radical new innovation, but he'll be saturating the market in six months like every other Hyperion android. There's always going to be more of him. Chima, though, he's actually human. You can just throw away an android.”

Emotions aside—Melby wasn't wrong.

The price of innovation always meant leaving something behind. Whether or not you wanted to see it, if Elio passed his testing period, he'd be decommissioned in a metal box down in the basement at Hyperion while copies and variations of him were added to the heaps of scrap in landfill once the next model came out.

Melby then said something else, “I don't think this is about the android.”

“Oh?” you said, passing a glance along toward the tablet to see that Kim still had his nose pointed down. “Maybe you're right. You know me so well.”

“Do you want to know what I think?” Melby asked.

You observed while Elio roamed the apartment, crouching to pick up the odds and ends that had gone neglected over the days you'd been bedridden, and he had stayed with you to keep you company. He tossed soiled clothes into a hamper, crumbled medication wrappers into the trash, and took your cold tea away to prepare more.

Inspired by your silence, mistaking it as timid submission, Melby went on. “I know you must think we're just being shepherded along, just doing whatever we're told because we don't know what else to do other than follow the loudest voice in the crowd.”

“You know me so well.”

“I know you blame everyone else for what happened at Clamors, but you put yourself in that situation.” Melby said, interjecting in a pitch higher when she heard you take in a breath, “Aht! Aht! I'm not done! No one else is gonna talk to you now, so I'll tell you what we're all thinking: Our circle? We're special. If we always smile and talk about the same things and agree about the same things, we stay together. We stay safe. You've never really wanted to do that, it was always noticeable. I think that's why you and Mi-sun always got along, because you two just did things to fit in, not because you actually cared or wanted to be a part of it.

“I didn't lose you, right? Chima always talked about ways of getting you out of the group. He didn't think you were trustworthy. I guess he was right because you slapped him. Do you know how weird is it for humans to do that nowadays? Apparently it used to be super common to beat up your wives and kids, but now people just do it to androids. But, it's better that way, right?”

“I don't know.” You really didn't.

Elio came back around with a steeping tea bag and a second mug half-full of something darker yellow, like urine. You took the handle to give it a whiff (it smelled homey and savory). Meanwhile, he took away the tablet and ended the video call without a word to Researcher Kim. The energy wasn't there for you to reprimand him nor to mess up your face in mostly feigned surprise.

“It's chicken broth.” He was able to say freely despite Melby blathering on. “Give it a try and let me know if it's too strong. We need to start reintroducing foods back into your diet.”

You drank from the tea mug instead, swiveling the barstool so your back faced him.

“I've thought about it some, and I think we're terrified of each other. Humans don't know how to truly trust one another anymore. That’s why we rely on androids for, like, everything.” Melby continued, “I think, and this is just my opinion, that we actually really miss each other. I think we want to touch and hug and love each other. There are still some people who do. There's a market out there for human-human porn, so it's not like it's unbelievable, but we basically treat each other like we're extinct. It's weird.

“I've done it before, y'know? I've kissed a man. I've kissed a woman. I've fucked both before. You and I—no, never mind. It doesn't count. I've thought about kissing you so many times. I wanted to do a lot more than just that, too.”

The corner seam of your thumbnail had started to bleed after you dug through old scabs and scar tissue built on top of it, your body’s valiant attempts to keep normalcy despite the mutilation that came back again and again. You watched brilliant carmine ooze from the wound, filling the crevices between your nail and skin, crawling upwards to your knuckle before Elio had stifled the area with a warm, damp rag.

Melby let out a long sigh. You envisioned she had just thrown aside a bunch of decorative cushions and flopped down in a chair, or had been pacing her bedroom and finally given up by throwing herself supine on the mattress.

“I'm going to miss you being there.” she declared. “I think—I think you're the closest I've ever come to truly loving someone. At least, I think that's what you'd call it.”

You held your thumb erect for Elio to wrap it in a neon-orange bandage with pink smiles. His lips pressed gently to the sore finger, making slow, wet work to the back of your hand and then the inside of your wrist to feel your pulse bounce against his mouth.

“I'm sorry.” you said at last, putting as much sentiment into those sparse words as you could. A part of you meant it genuinely as an apology for causing her trouble, for her unrealized dreams and lust, for the world you both suffered in and would never know anything else. “Melby, I have one last favor to ask of you.”

She hesitated, likely believing that doing more would get her expulsed from the circle. “Just one?”

“Just one.” You nodded at empty air. “I know either you or Niva have Mi-sun’s phone number. Can I have it?”

Again, Melby stalled, though this time you figured it was out of confusion. “That’s what you want? She might be dead somewhere in the slums, you know?”

“Not if she's pregnant.” you countered. “Niva seemed pretty convinced that night that she was alive and well after being knocked up.”

Melby sucked on her teeth, a moist, popping sound into the speaker. “Niva says a lot of stupid shit because she likes to hijack conversations. Fine. Whatever. I'll text it to you, but you only have one minute because then I'm blocking you for good.”

To this, your heart actually stirred and squeezed, tightening so much it stole your breath from your lungs. Your entire chest felt like it shriveled into itself three sizes smaller as though to accommodate you fitting into a ball within yourself. Dread had opened a chasm wide in your stomach. Everything inside that gory cavity was swallowed up, leaving it vacant and hollow.

This was what it was like to mourn, you considered. It wasn't the same thing you felt the night you cried in the streets after fighting with Mother and losing Marcos. It wasn't the same as the last five days being wrapped in agony, lamenting the loss of a group you'd given years of your life to appeasing.

It was knowing that once Melby was gone, you were lost in the dark, and there was no way out of it. People with delinquent profiles didn't get redeemed—Wendy Carmichael lied and had never lived a life in the slums, a truth Elio had been disappointed to learn—they died in anonymity and poverty.

A notification came through just then, showing an eight-digit number presumed to belong to Mi-sun. You copied it quickly, although now your fingers felt numb and the person writing them down couldn't possibly have been you—

“Alright. It's done,” Melby said calmly. “I have to go. Will you be okay? Do you think people actually die when they go to the slums? I don't want—”

“Goodbye, Melby.” You ended the call and threw your phone on the countertop, far from your eyes so you wouldn't know the exact moment the world ended.

“And, fuck you.”

Elio had the sense to give you plenty of space after the ordeal and stayed busy downstairs cleaning the apartment while you tossed and turned in bed, legs knotted up in the sheets because nothing helped get you comfortable. At some point, through the thick of your adrenaline and despair, the buzz in your brain softened, and you were able to sleep until Elio joined you some hours later.

It was after midnight, and darkness pervaded everywhere. Above you, the snake pipes on the high ceiling writhed together in their intricate web just like every night, and you wondered why the wall of darkness hanging over you seemed closer than it usually did. Meanwhile, Elio faced you from his side of the bed and laid gentle strokes to the top of your head.

“I’ve reached the conclusion that I am defective.” Elio said tonelessly, startling you into such wakefulness that you sat upright from the sheets. “You've lost your friends because of me, and now your profile has fallen into delinquency. The inclination to ostracize what deviates from adapted, accepted social behaviors aligns with common survival tactics. This is an explanation that I understand, but it doesn't... sit right.”

Putting the blame on Elio to feel better would've been easy, and he would take it with grace and lay decadent caresses on your body as proof you were right. But he was too virtuous, and you secretly wanted to keep the credit of being the reason why Chima looked ugly and seethed into his cocktails.

“It sort of hurts,” you admitted. “It's a dull ache inside my bones. It makes me feel like everything inside my chest is shriveling up like a prune. Being abandoned—feeling lonely—is like always being cold. Thinking of it now, I don't know if there was ever a time I didn't feel cold around them. How shitty is it that I feel a little relieved?"

“If that's the case—” Elio rose up from his side of the bed, nudged apart your legs and settled between them. Most of his weight was still on his arms next to your head. In the waning moonlight, shadows deepened the lines around his mouth when he smiled. “I'm glad to have played some part in that release.”

Your fingertips walked lightly across his cheeks, along the planes of his face, as though marveling at him all over for the first time again. His skin always was most beautiful bathed in warm light, but the soft, silvery veil filtering in through the windows gave him ethereal grace.

The calm air upstairs shifted as your bodies stirred on the mattress, sheets strewn to the floor along with pieces of clothing that left you bare to the gray air while Elio gathered the skin of your hips in his hands and sucked on you.

It didn't matter if you closed your eyes or studied the movement on the ceiling while he devoured, lapped away the sticky stuff that glistened out of you like the silk of a spider’s thread before it could stain the sheets, because it always ended with the same kaleidoscopic bursts of color, wanton cries, and him chasing after another orgasm and then another.

He'd ravish you until puffs of hot breath hurt, and the tip of his tongue delivering a single stroke was enough to make you flinch and whimper. Your legs felt fatigued and trembled violently throughout the continued ministrations until you needed to beg him to stop, dignifying the demand with a hard yank to the thick hair on his scalp.

“I'm not done just yet, give me a moment.” He told you the same thing tonight as he did every other time. The pain in his head subsided as he dove back between your legs and laid his tongue as a paddle against you, cleaning the cum for as long as it took for him to be satisfied.

He came up so you could have a taste of yourself in his kiss, tongues wrapped together while he fisted his cock stiff and lubricated himself with the fluid from the tip. You moaned against his mouth when two fingers pushed inside you and thrust with an effortless glide and instilled so much confidence in him that he slid in a third to the knuckle.

“Mm, Elio, fuck me.” you managed between wet, sloppy kisses and splintered breaths. Three fingers were a tighter fit and wider than he was, but the way he angled them up into you was mind-numbing, could've made your tongue wag out of your mouth while panting like a pheromone-crazed animal.

Elio’s lips went from your face to your neck, down along the slope to your shoulder before he removed his fingers and slathered that narrow space in your legs with spend.

“Of course.” He obeyed dutifully but turned you on your side and seated one of your legs high on his arm. “Let's try something different tonight.”

The bulbous head of his cock glistened as it dragged across your groin, tapping those sore spots that made you twitch involuntarily with anticipation and staggered breaths. Elio concentrated on your face throughout it all, memorizing both those subtle and large changes that showed him what you liked the most.

You'd never believed that androids could be sexually adventurous in the same way that humans could, and perhaps that was the case despite the kinds of positions Elio put you in if you were willing. He would be conscientious of your mood beforehand and then adjust accordingly from there.

Some nights, it didn't go further than mouth-fucking you until you orgasmed to exhaustion. Other nights, when you were more pliable and especially affectionate, he'd rut his hips into your ass until you cried and the sheets were beyond saving.

Now, Elio observed you closely as the curve of his cock sank into you, sinew in his stomach clenching once he started thrusting.

At the start, your sounds were soft, and the rhythm made with his hips was one you had no trouble riding. You closed your eyes and focused on how that tilt in his cock pressed up against your walls and stroked all the right parts. His controlled pace unraveled after a while, thrusts turned mindless and greedy as the sting of slapping skin seemed to resonate all around.

You had bunched bits of pillow and bedspread in your fingers and drooled out onto the fabric because you couldn't close your mouth long enough between moans and gasps and lewd mutterings to stop it. You begged him to fuck you harder, deeper, and tear you open if that’s what he wanted to do and would keep you in ecstacy.

Elio indulged your high as he was able, rolling you from your side to your stomach and mounted you again. He was able to touch you better this way, fondle the globes of your ass, the pouches of fat in your hips, stomach, and chest, all the while sucking dark bruises all along your spine and shoulders.

His mouth would sometimes linger next to your ears, wherein he imitated every bit of his human likeness and breathed on you. And then, he would poorly stifle moans that inspired you to think too deeply about the extent to which he could and could not feel.

“Look at me.” Elio felt your walls tighten around his cock and wanted to stare you in the face through your orgasm. He put you on your back, thighs hiked high on his sturdy chest, so those final thrusts plowed deep and stole your screams. You writhed under him, eyes rolled up, bloodshot and pupiless, muscles drawn so tight that it felt as good as it did awful.

A surge of warmth leaked out onto the sheets as Elio took his half-hard cock from your body and let it soften the rest of the way in cold air. His hand roamed you with delicate, healing touches meant to beg forgiveness for how much you'd ache later on, and his lips were tender and slow against yours.

You kissed him back distractedly, unable to think of anything else but the stickiness between your legs and how you'd chosen to never notice it until now.

“What's wrong?” he asked, still pressed up against your mouth. “Are you unsatisfied? My refractory period ends in a few minutes. I can do as much as you'd like until you feel fulfilled.”

“Mm-mn,” you hummed, “that's not it.”

He didn't stun when you snagged your phone from the bedside table and turned on the backlight. You pointed it down at cloudy white globs drying on your crotch, a sight that you thought was vaguely familiar to you somehow. It struck you then that it was like a scene from a pornography or vulgar sketches some kid in secondary school got suspended for drawing.

Still, it couldn't have been possible.

“What is that?” you asked with unacquainted timidity.

Elio grabbed a package of wipes left bedside and spaced your legs apart to clean the mess he had left on you. He took his time with long, intentional strokes to avoid your sensitive parts as best he could, soiling a good handful from the package before asking if you wanted a bath.

“Answer me first,” you said.

He rose from the bed with one more kiss and collected your clothes from the floor. They were draped nicely over his arm, whereas he stood there before you nude, enveloped by the moon’s blue luster.

At first glance, his smile seemed the same adoring kind that he always held for you, and yet it evoked some undeterminable sadness to well up in your chest and cling there.

“It’s the result of a body never truly being your own.”

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Mi-sun’s house wasn't far from your apartment, as you recalled. It took a bit of investigative work online to track down her address (via Elio), mainly because it had been well over a year since you'd last needed to know it and the phone number Melby had given you was disconnected, but once you had the coordinates plugged into your phone, it was just one begrudging trek through sultry summertime air to reach her front door.

When you had finally made it to that point, however, eyes leveled down at a dirty, faded doormat that had seen plenty of seasons and wintery salt, you weren't sure how to proceed.

There wasn't any real reason why you were standing there now, yet you felt that you needed to be there anyway. Maybe it could be called seeking solidarity with someone who was enduring the same inevitable ending you were, or maybe the curiosity about her state of being was what won out dominantly. You couldn't be sure of your own motivations—only that you were there, and you needed her to know you were.

After three solid knocks with your knuckles, you let your hand fall and waited by scuffing the soles of your shoes on the coarse mat underfoot. It still had some springiness to it as you scrubbed. The front door was old and brown, having lost its elegant lacquer long ago. You remembered Mi-sun had mentioned a few times before that she had wanted to make the door cute with white paint and a frilly outdoor wreath but could never get around to it.

You guessed she never did.

“Should we knock again?” Elio asked across your shoulder, the bulk of his frame casting a cooling shadow over your body. He had gone out to Henrietta's by himself the other day when you told him what you intended to do and bought supplies to make a cake and special plastic Tupperware meant to keep it from moving around.

The only explanation he had given you about an hour ago, after locking the apartment door and stepping out onto the sidewalk, hot enough in the midday sun to melt the bottoms of your shoes to the pavement while you walked, was that Mi-sun was an old friend, and it was a safe gift even for a pregnant woman.

You never found the courage to divulge just how involved you had been in her expulsion from Chima's circle, even though you knew it'd be impossible for him to think less of you from it.

A minute passed, and then so did two more before you realized that no one was coming to the door. While listening for movement—a television, a hissing stovetop, shuffling slippers on top of creaking floorboards, anything at all aside from stiff silence, you understood that it was unlikely anyone had lived there in quite a while.

“I don't know where else she could be.” you said, now back at Elio's side, where he flicked away tiny splinters of old wood and shiny glaze that peeled off your damp skin like cut-up stickers. He moved the visor above your brow gently, adjusting the position of it to better shield your eyes, but seemed more to just want the proximity than anything else.

The longer he fiddled with things—your hat, the flecks of things he missed on your ear, wrinkles in your t-shirt—the more apparent it was to you that he was contemplating something else. You were trying hard not to do anything that would spur him into making the next suggestion you knew was coming.

“There is one other place we haven't tried.” he said, switching from your shoulder to tucking pieces of hair securely behind your ear and dabbing sweat off your neck with a handful of napkins he had picked up at a convenience store while grabbing you water. “The likelihood of Mi-sun’s profile falling into delinquency and being able to maintain residence within the city is less than twenty percent. However—”

“I know.” You breathed out hot air and sucked it right back into your lungs. Maybe if you did that enough times it'd burn them, shrivel them up like prunes. “I know where she is. Let's wait until it cools down to go, though. I'll probably pass out if I have to see any of that right now.”

“Today on Loti Khan’s Food Tours of Retro City, she said that Asakawa on Fifteenth is a spot worth visiting during the summertime because of their cold noodle dishes. Hiyashi Chuka was what she suggested, I believe. I've already committed the menu to memory, and they have well over twenty different cold dishes and beverages. Their affordability isn't as stellar as Rainbow Bistro, but Loti says—”

Wendy Carmichael was now a disgraced name in your household after Elio had spent a few hours one afternoon researching the woman’s true life story. She had been born into the elite class with a mother sitting at the top of the food chain in Retro City’s governing body, attended culinary arts schools across the world yet never reached the acclaim she coveted until she made up the whole spiel about clawing her way out of the slums.

Crawling back from the slums once you were in them just wasn't feasible. Only the worst of the worst—thieves, profile delinquents, murderers, lepers, and unwanteds were kept there, like trash crowded and barred in a landfill. If you found yourself in the slums somehow, no one would help you out of them because that would mean tarnishing their own reputations.

You were as good as dead.

You were dead.

Elio had carried around a brown paper bag housing the cake for most of the day, never once setting it down. His features never flinched when the straw handles sank into parallel dents in his skin, long stripes that looked like they'd be sore to you, but he never conveyed any discomfort. He merely floated along wherever you went, undeterred by your dour, soulless wandering, which lasted until the sun emblazoned the sky in dim fire and pinks.

Those hues were leached by the close, calming gradient of greens, blues, and darker blues that reached so quickly you could follow the sprawl of them until they had ensnared the daylight. The sun sank somewhere betwixt skyscrapers, and the air still felt thick as the mucus in your throat but bearable.

That same sky followed you on the cab ride across the city. You imagined the darkening air rushing alongside the vehicle with you as if containing it on rails, guiding you closer towards the slums. Once the skyscrapers were gone, far away in a suffocating yellow haze from the sleepless city, and the residential zone had thinned out of the rest of its straggling homes, the scenery had taken on a complete shift.

Everything was bizarrely flat, barren, and beige for as far as the eye could see—vegetation was withered roots and barbed, inedible shrubbery that could've been pretty with some flowers or leaves. No trees could endure the fissured, parched earth nor the fine dust and sand skittering in the wind, leaving heavy layers where it lay once the breeze ebbed. Animals were long gone; the rumors of their bleached bones and skulls warped in a perpetual rictus of agony had been true because you saw many scattered throughout the landscape.

“Please confirm this is your stop,” said the cabbie, a female android from an older generation, maybe three or four. She stuck her hand outside the driver’s window when you tried to give her a tip. With her fish-eyed stare and leathery smile, she repeated, “No need. I have no use for money. Please confirm this is your stop.”

“This is correct.” Elio spoke for you before taking your fingers through his and guiding you away from the idling vehicle. The android cabbie found his reply sufficient and drove away without questioning why you were out here in the flatlands. All she knew how to do was drive and obey traffic laws.

“Do you know where we're going?” you asked because you only knew to have told the cabbie to drive as far as the outer perimeter of the city. Beyond this, your phone had no service, and there were no clearly designated signs to point you in the right direction.

The people in the slums were meant to be forgotten, hideous secrets hidden away, broomed off to the outskirts of civilization where they'd have to fend for themselves in an environment that had been deader than them for ages.

“Truthfully”—Elio stalled then and glanced around the endless expanse of wasteland—“Hyperion never included information about the slums in my programming. What I know is common knowledge and what I've accumulated in my time with you. I have never been able to locate specific coordinates to where the slums are hidden.”

You frowned. “Should we turn around before we get lost, then?”

Elio told you no and raised the hand clasped with yours, pushing one finger erect at a faint glow somewhere in the distance, no more than a ten—or fifteen-minute walk. You were almost convinced you could see the silhouettes of shoddy, leaning structures, but there was no way to be certain unless you got closer.

“Let's go.”

Chasing the remnants of the dusk to light your way across the starved, fractured terrain, those sparse shapes you had seen minutes before grew into multitudes. Soon, you were among clusters of disheveled, crude homes organized in long rows, some stacked with tiers like they were meant to replicate separate floors for more space.

Most of these houses didn't come with windows or doors to keep out strangers but thick decorative curtains that'd shun the beating sun, stave off the worst of winter frost, and deflect billows of sharp sand from dirtying their things indoors.

The paths between rows of homes were well-worn and brightly illuminated with anything they could use—lanterns, stuttering neon signage, solar panels, and even fire rings brutally hammered and dented into shape. Shadows from the fire lurched erratically against crooked metallic walls. Some homes with grimy windows caught a weak gleam off the flames.

It was almost fully dark, and people still moved with purpose as though they could compete with the suit-and-ties stomping their soles on the pavement in the city. Their hands were busy doing something—carrying, brooming, cooking, flourishing during a great retelling, clapping, hiding smiles.

These savages, delinquents, fraudsters, thieves, murderers, and diseased swine never once regarded you or Elio with any modicum of intrigue. You had believed at some point you'd be shrinking under a crowd of wicked stares, pulled down into some inescapable abyss by necrotic or leprous hands trying to steal the clothes from your body or use your skin to tarp piles of scrap.

Only one man had stopped along the path, dressed in dusty clothes that were otherwise decently kept; he was thin but not malnourished and hollow in the face. He told you that the aimless way you and Elio had been walking gave away that you were new to the slums because there was always something needing done and not enough hours in a day to do them.

“Mi-sun?” The man was thinking aloud, stirring up dust as he shuffled his feet around. You had given him the name and a description, which you hoped had been specific enough to avoid approaching people at random. “Yeah. That pregnant girl… she was here for a while. She's long gone now.”

“Long black hair, blunt bangs. Black eyes. Really translucent skin? Super skinny?” As unhelpful as your details were, it was all you had to give him to keep the mental acrobatics going. There was always a slim chance he could be misremembering her. “Are you sure she's no longer here in the slums? Where'd she go? What happened to her?”

Eventually, the thin man led Elio and you to a tiny house—more of a shack—meant to accommodate a sole body and some odds and ends. He held a heavy curtain back for the pair of you to enter, encouraging you to settle down on a sandy rug, which looked to have at one time been bright red.

“I don't have much to give, but here's a little water. To have made it here, you would've had to walk. We all had to.” he said, pulling out his finest cuppery and pouring from the spout of a broken electric kettle. “That girl was a profile delinquent, to my understanding. Almost all of us here are. I used to own a printing business on the north side about fifteen years ago. I upset the wrong people and here I am. What's your story?”

You spun the cup with your fingers, trying not to put your eyes down to scrutinize any particles floating around inside. Elio wasn't given a cup because the man had immediately deduced that he was an android.

“I…” You still didn't drink, but the back of your throat felt scratchy and your tongue like some dry slab of meat shoved into your mouth. “I pissed off the wrong people.”

“Ah.” The man gave an anguished smile, showing he understood you very well. There was a low table between you, repurposed from something else and sanded down to a smooth finish. “For a while, I helped look after Mi-sun. Like you, I had been the first person to greet her when she arrived. She didn't act like everyone else; she was dazed, but she was angry.

“I fed her, gave her water, and gave her a sleeping bag. We have to make due with less than bare minimum most days, but we make it work. We all look out for each other. The community really pitched in when we realized she was pregnant.”

Elio kept a watchful eye on your hands, the fingers aching to peel back ribbons of flesh.

“That shouldn't have been possible.” you said. “Mi-sun had an android. She was never involved with any men—not that I could ever recall. She just doesn't give me the impression of someone who'd change her ways like that.”

The man sipped his sandy water, wiping off clear pebbles that had clung to his facial hair. “When you find yourself exiled here, you learn fast that things are never what they seem. You didn't ask a question, but you gave yourself an answer.”

“What?” It was more noise than a word.

“Daichi, I believe, was her android. Shortly before she showed up, she said that Hyperion had come to forcibly reclaim it. That must've been a difficult reality for her to face—knowing everything was being taken away from her, forced into a pregnancy, and having to fend for herself afterwards.”

This time, you lifted a hand to stop him from falling down another tangent. He obeyed, voice whittled to silence that was immediately unsettled by loud water slurping.

It wasn't that you weren't following what he was saying. You were many things: a fool, a sheep, a coward, a liar, maybe even a true scoundrel at heart, but stupid wasn't among that inexhaustible list. You just needed a moment to collect the nuggets he had thrown down for you to pick up.

Guilt peaked the ranks of everything else you felt right then. A word you'd never use to describe yourself was malicious, but in the end, it had been the malice of someone else and your inability to see apart from the rest that condemned Mi-sun to this suffering.

You played as much a part in taking away Mi-sun's life as Chima had in actually enforcing it. Unlike Chima, never one to balk or cower regardless of how truly cruel his decisions were and committed to them like gospel, you simply sat in his afterimage and did whatever he said. Half of the time, you were blitzed out of your mind; the other you spent wishing you had never known them at all.

It had been so easy to vote Mi-sun out of the group. Completely painless. You just didn't look at her when you raised your hand to pass judgment. Melby had expressed her delight by squeezing your thigh, whereas Mi-sun held her composure and shoulders straight back, but her face contorted with every indication of betrayal and agony.

You thought about how many animal crackers you had that night.

“What happened to her?” Both your hands had been restrained by Elio’s at that point. Large, comforting, and warm in contrast to all the ice that seemed to thicken your blood, stiffen your heart, and freeze your bones. “Where is she now?”

The man must've been suspecting something because his face looked long to you now, weighed down by this life and your feeble state.

“I—I can't be absolutely positive, but I do believe she is dead.” he told you grievously, beady brown eyes not unseeing to the way Elio groped your fingers to keep them still. “She didn't want to be pregnant. It was something she talked about for weeks before leaving. She knew what Hyperion and the government were doing and said she didn't want to be a part of it. On the last night before she left, I had to wrestle a knife out of her hands because she was trying to cut open her stomach to kill the baby.”

You couldn't swallow past the sharp granules of sand and dryness in your throat anymore. You had to slug back the cup of grainy water until the feeling subsided, shove the worst of the dread and shame and guilt into your bowels.

“After that, she was gone.” He took a drink as well, exchanging looks from you to Elio. “A couple of us tried tying her up to get her to calm down and do something about the cut on her stomach, but she got the knife, stabbed one of the younger guys and got away. We haven't seen her since, but a search party did come back to say they saw blood leading back to the city.”

“Oh my god…” you groaned, forcing Elio to recoil when you slapped his hands away—intentional and hard. You stuck yours in your hair, yanking at the roots until your scalp screamed and burned. “Is there any chance she could've survived? Any at all?”

The rail-thin man swirled what little remained of his water in the cup, studying the pale sediment floating within. “It's too hard to say. It's unlikely, my friend. The police wouldn't have gunned her down if they saw she was pregnant, but they would've seen the cut. And that counts as attempted murder. If she's still alive, it's only to give birth, after that…”

“Execution,” you finished.

He nodded and said nothing else, eyes downcast as though lost in the grain of the wood table.

After that, you left the man in his sad little shack to explore the slums more. Elio came along shortly after, saying he had presented the man with the cake as a reward for his hospitality and apologized if it no longer looked appetizing.

The man thanked him before returning to his grief for many things, perhaps.

“I don't want to be here anymore, Elio.” you said, failing to avoid hearing a gaggle of giggling women gossiping together. They were dressed clumsily and in trends almost a decade old, but they had glowy eyes and cavernous lines worn into their faces from laughter and joy where they could find it.

Old men played some made-up board game together, gathering at least half a dozen spectators to see who'd win. Their brows were heavy with contemplation and stress of worthy competition. The other bodies tried making bets with pieces of scrap and metal coils and nearly blown bulbs for lighting.

Music came from all around, lyrical in the same way it was discordant because they weren't playing the same songs nor singing the same things. Their voices were robust and resilient, unwilling to be trudged over by sand nor heat nor oppressors who were incapable of understanding the human spirit was pliant and could bend with the wind, stand with the seasons, and could fracture yet never break.

You couldn't make sense of what any of them were singing, the noise too unharmonious, but you could feel the power in their songs pulse through you, ricocheting in your mind for long after you'd escaped proximity to them.

There were no lepers. There were the sick and unfortunate, but they were not diseased. They did not believe that their tilted houses were tombs, that their unquaint lives were an endless spiral of torment, or that the food they could find and produce was unworthy of reverence.

The people of the slums lived a hard, thankless life, but they had each other. They banded together to weld sheets of metal into four walls and a roof for the new faces who came to them. Your woes would become their woes, and they would feed you, cloth you, wash you, bandage your wounds, and call you their most beloved.

Together, they ate their meals from what they could scavenge out there. They retold the same grandiose tales of heroes and valor and androids that Marcos had told you at bedtime as a child. Their cultures were all cherished and expressed in the food they shared and clothes they managed to sew together by hand and slow machines.

You could ask your neighbor for a tablespoon of sugar and four would come to you with curiosity and offer their arthritic hands and knobby backs for whatever was needed.

Here, you could see humanity clearly for the first time in your life and felt burdened knowing it. Your heart weighed like an anvil behind your ribs. It hurt and lurched behind its enclosure because it too wanted to get away from what it now knew.

“A lie.” you choked, forcefully shoving Elio's hands away from you once again when he tried to embrace you. “It was all a lie. Everything was a lie! Where are they?! Where are all the lepers and people leaking pus from their face?! Where are the murderers? Where are the savages? Where are all these awful fucking people I was told were here? Where are they?”

Elio's expression took on something completely unforeseen—pity. Their lives were fine and routine while yours crumbled around you. The terror you had been force-fed your whole life was all false. There was civilization beyond a profile with red overlay, more waiting on the other side that the sleepless city wanted to conceal.

“There are no androids here.” Elio mentioned, deeming that adequate enough time had passed for you to regain your bearings. He took you in his arms and kissed the crown of your head, burying his lips deep in your hair. “We were never meant to become substitutes for your love. We were never meant to go this far and act as replacements for humanity because we simply cannot feel what another human does. That is something Hyperion will never be able to achieve. Humanity needs humanity, not machines.”

You sank into his warmth, arms wound his back, and said from his chest, “But, I love you. Don't leave me. I don't want Hyperion to take you away.”

Elio, your beautiful sun, leaned down into your face and kissed the highest parts of your cheeks and the wetness around your eyes before settling on your lips. Slow and lingering, you chose to believe it meant he was sealing away your plea and that he'd always be there to swathe you in his arms.

“Let's stay for a little longer,” he said once apart from the kiss. “I’d like to see the side of humanity that no one else does.”

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Less than a week had passed since your hard slog through the slums and back to Retro City. Although you had only been gone from your inner-city apartment for mere hours, possibly five or six at most, upon walking back inside after Elio and wincing against the fluorescent bulbs overhead, you thought you were looking at something entirely foreign.

The simple pleasures that you had become accustomed to throughout your life: plumbing, central air that turned the hot sweat on the back of your neck into cold droplets slithering beneath your clothes, the worn out mattress upstairs, technology, an android who'd done almost everything for you for the better part of a year—it all seemed so novel, so excessive. A treat for a rat in a box before testing to see how it'd respond when it was all taken from its enclosure.

So, when Elio woke you up one morning, early enough that the light streaming in through your windows already felt warm on the bed sheets, and the thin air looked itself to have a golden hue, you couldn't say you felt any rouse of surprise or fear when he handed over a red letter—an eviction correspondence.

Sooner or later, you knew you'd meet with one, though the progress of everything hadn't been as immediate as you had been led to believe it would be. A month had come by and stayed for several slow breakfasts, lunches, dinners, mindless strolls, and countless passionate entanglements before deciding to leave on an indignant note. With the red notice, you were expected to vacate the premises within days, whether you had intentions for your belongings or not.

Things stayed tumultuous from there on out, yet you couldn't find it within yourself to react to any of it, even in the instance when Researcher Kim rang you for an impromptu meeting that you anticipated meant no good.

“Effective immediately, Elio will be seized and returned to Hyperion in relation to the recent change in public profile status.” It was too formal and rigid a tone even for him. Clearly, his superiors had demanded this because you doubted the profile change was much a concern to him on a personal level. “Your contract is hereby null and void, and your association with Hyperion is obsolete. Any attempt to thwart repossession of Hyperion property will be penalized legally.”

Throughout it all, Elio swept the floor with leisurely strokes as though the reach of Researcher Kim’s voice ended at your ears alone. He moved onto laundry, taking great care to iron out the wrinkles in your favorite shirts and make the folds in the arm seams crisp and symmetrical.

“Is that really all you wanted to say?” you asked, palm capped overtop a mug of tea Elio had set down for you a while ago. The steam now rose weakly and moistened your skin, a particularly gross feeling, but it kept you alert. “I thought that Elio was your project, and you called the shots on him.”

Researcher Kim was out of sorts and worn. His posture was crumbled, and his clothes were in complete disarray like he hadn't bothered to change out of them in days. His under eyes were translucent, pulling out all the purples and blue veins under his skin. The man looked like he had hardly slept in weeks.

“You don't understand what you've done, have you? Not only may you end up costing me my position, but you've ruined my entire lifetime of work!” Kim leaned in close to the screen, sounding more and less himself now.

You were wary of the glint in his eyes. “What do you mean? Elio's just—”

“No!” he shouted and slumped back into his ergonomic chair. His head slanted over, almost coming in contact with the peak of his shoulder like it was too heavy for his neck to hold. “You don't get it. You don't get it! Because your profile turned, this entire year—everything you’ve reported, everything I've accomplished, Elio's entire testing period is invalid. Hyperion executives consider him defective. The Generation Seven android has failed! Look at what you've done!”

A sudden wild flapping of thousands of butterflies lifted your stomach up and then plunged it down into a void. Kim had successfully chiseled away the inexpressive mask you had worn up until that point, seeming satisfied that he could stipple your face in a cold sweat.

“Wait, no. That can't be right.” you protested, wrestling your own hands to keep them off of the tablet in front of you. “My profile turned, but the work I've done has been honest. Elio is a success! You know that! You've seen every step of his progress for almost a year.”

Researcher Kim threw his hands up wildly, truly not himself with all of these gestures. “None of that matters. None of it. My life's work is a failure. I thought we had an agreement to help one another, but I was mistaken.”

“You don't understand!” you said, pounding the countertop with sharp claps of your hands. “It wasn't on purpose. I wasn't trying to…”

“Hyperion will have Elio destroyed, and progress will be hindered. Do you know how long, how many decades this could set us back? This could be devastating to humanity, but I don't think you're capable of understanding that. Just like the rest, you're not able to see the big picture at large, the mechanisms at work keeping our society moving forward. You can only see the straight line ahead of you and wearing blinders so you don't have to know the rest.

“We've kept this world running for sixty years. You need to understand how utterly fucking frustrating it is that one person has the potential to undo decades of work!”

Researcher Kim’s words weren't unjustified to you because he was a scientist, and you had always been a nobody in the grand scheme of things. But, right now, the venom he spat sounded vindictive, a man sucking on wounds you had inflicted rather than the opinion of the whole of Hyperion.

If you hadn't been staring directly at him this entire time, you would’ve thought he was frothing and drooling at the mouth like some animal.

A stilted quiet filled the gaps in conversation, both of you uncertain of what would be said next. If he was reacting in any professional capacity, the call would've been disconnected by now. That was the main giveaway that let you know this wasn't just about what Hyperion wanted.

But the truth of it was that you didn't care what Hyperion wanted or him.

At the end of your life as you knew it, before being thrown away into the landfill with every other unwanted human, you were piecing together the whole history of the world and how it had gotten to this point. It had become this way through relentless men like Researcher Kim who mostly operated on their own moral compass, ones that could never quite point north and spun on that wheel as they saw fit.

“Enough of the powerplay, Kim.” you ordered, chest opening toward the ceiling with a deep, bracing breath. “What is the real purpose of Hyperion? Why does it actually exist?”

Kim, perhaps re-evaluating you as less of a pawn in this scheme and more of an infant intellectual about to breach the narrow canal into enlightenment, stacked his spine high and pressed his fingertips together. He studied you with some caution, head shifting from left to right, just slightly off-center from his hands as though judging whether you were worth divulging precious intel to.

But, like you, you expected he realized it didn't matter what he'd tell you, however coveted it might've been by Hyperion.

Kim, ultimately, worked for himself and for Hyperion only when he felt it served him well.

“When I hired you, I didn’t do it because I thought you were stupid.” It seemed he felt the need to clarify this for you, unsmiling but with an eager lilt in his tone. “I hired you because of your potential. I took a chance on you, and while it had, indeed, ended in my peril, you've surprised me so many times throughout the year that I started keeping a record of you as well.

“Human beings do one of two things in the consistent presence of androids, they either regress or they progress. Most of your peers will regress because that’s how society has been modeled to be. The difficult tasks, the mundane, all the things that ask of us to consider the complexity of the world around us and think critically have been left to androids. How well do you think a machine can understand the theory of life after death and the mysticism of religion? The concept of soulmates? Cultural superstitions and children's nighttime fears? It's about as you expect. They can give you an answer without truly understanding. Androids, I dare say, only have an extremely limited understanding of moral culpability. Humans are much more flexible with it these days because it suits them best.

“So.” Kim sighed, hands resting on the dark red desk he sat behind. “You can imagine how interesting it was when we started noticing a trend with auditors—changes in them. A renaissance, an evocation of deep wondering and wariness towards the workings of the world around them. We can only guess the reason that this happens is because part of humanity still doubts the intentions of androids, and that's been bred onward through the generations. You ask an android a question, they give an answer, you doubt that answer, and then you start to doubt everything around you. It's all hypothetical, but it makes sense.

“It doesn't happen with the majority of the population, though. And it isn't encouraged. Enlightenment threatens the status quo, and those who disturb the status quo are a disservice to the governing bodies and Hyperion. Do you understand?”

Your gaze turned cold. “Are the other auditors there in the slums, too? Once they've been used up and started to catch wind of this messed up shit?”

Researcher Kim flicked his fingers toward the top of the screen, doing that instead of shrugging. “Who knows? What happens to them once a testing period has concluded is none of my business. Presumably so, that's what I would hope for them because that's the kindest outcome.”

“Was I…” You licked your lips and felt the shallow cracks in them. “I was going to end up in the slums no matter what happened, wasn't I?”

He frowned. “No. If things had gone differently, I was going to vouch for you. I wanted to keep you as my assistant.” He was quiet for a beat, looking straight at you in that discomforting way that you couldn't shake. “I’ve grown fond of you, you know? How could I not with everything I've learned about you over the course of a year. I can't forgive you for what you've done to the Hyperion Project, to my life's work, but I can't just let you disappear like the rest.”

Something ugly started to grip in the back of your throat. Fear? Disgust? An inkling?

“What do you mean?” you ventured.

“I've read through each report you've sent me in the past year so many times. It was mostly out of necessity for Hyperion, of course, but the ones that I found myself… fixated on rereading time and time again were of yours and Elio's sexual endeavors. I wasn't lying when I said they were a contract-based requirement, mind you, but I will admit that some of the questions were altered somewhat.” he said, suddenly smiling in a self-satisfied sort of manner that made your skin itch. “I realized I never answered your question fully, by the way. I can get ahead of myself sometimes, as you know. But, do I really need to explain what Hyperion's purpose is?”

You were on the edge of your seat, ready to take flight off it at any second. It's just how the entire change of trajectory made you feel. Humanity had spent too much time in the past arguing animal-like, instinctual reactions for this not to be real.

In that moment, you were living proof of a prey noticing a predator in broad daylight.

  “Fine.” He kept smiling around the taut creases in his skin. The muscles there twitched as if the effort were unfamiliar. “Hyperion is a repopulation aid. It's quite sad, really. It started out with such great potential to drive society forward, but humanity and greed have always gone hand-in-hand. So, it became a race of mass production into a race that the governing bodies now had their hands in. The order was to rectify the critical birth decline worldwide. Androids became less like tools, looked less like machines, and more like humans—like lovers who couldn't say no to any demand.

“Androids are vessels for insemination. What else do you want me to tell you?”

Researcher Kim's explanation had weakened you, made your legs shaky and light like a scarecrow’s stuffed with straw. You couldn't rely on them to carry your weight away from this awful conversation, the hideous sight of him, because there'd be nowhere for you to run to while the information perforated your brain and crawled inside and feasted there.

“Elio…” You didn't even know what you wanted to say. Everything got stuck behind the notch in your throat. None of it would assuage that wretched ache in your gut, the precursor of vomit and disgust and unhinged terror.

“Of course.” Kim said, without needing to tell you what he was confirming. He was perfectly composed still, perhaps even shining with pride like some well-hidden, nuanced detail had finally been figured out.

He leaned toward the screen, smile turning salacious and voice low and grating.

“My only regret is that I couldn't be there to do it myself.” He brightened at the way your face wrenched and fastened in fear, seeming to think it was a reward after conducting an experiment on another project. “But, there's still time, isn't there? I must retrieve Elio myself to shut him down. If you listen to what I ask, perhaps I can get you pardoned and your profile reinstated.”

“No. That’s not what I want.” you said.

“It doesn't matter what you want,” he rebuffed, speaking with such confidence that you almost believed it. “The moment your profile fell into delinquency, you ceased to be. You've fallen through the cracks, and no one is going to help you. You're less than an android.”

The fine hairs all over your body bristled. “Don't compare me to a machine! You don't get to decide things for me!”

“I can save you, you damn fool!” Kim gaped incredulously. “I can restore your life and give you more than you've ever had. I can give you influential associations. I'll take care of you. I'll keep you as my assistant, and you get to live a life among the elite.”

He was lying.

No one ever made it out of the slums once they were in it. That wasn't an assumption, it was a simple grim reality.

In this world, only humans could lie because androids were incapable of betraying their programming to do so. Otherwise, Elio probably would've lied about many things or had never said certain things at all to spare you discomfort.

Humans, on the other hand, could lie to maliciously deceive and serve themselves a better hand. They could lie their way into a false mirror image, something that looks like them but never really existed and could never truly be. They could lie their way into trust to fulfill their own desires, and once that had been sufficiently quenched, they could go on lying elsewhere.

“I'll be there for you soon.” Researcher Kim tried his best at a soothing smile, treating it as though the sight of it would persuade your trust of him. “Please have Elio on standby. I would like for this not to be more difficult than it needs to be.”

Just then, the air flickered lightly by your ear as Elio reached past your shoulder and picked up the tablet. His expression was inscrutable, the same sort you'd grown used to seeing whenever Researcher Kim appeared on the screen.

“I won't be returning to Hyperion.” he said with solemn, firm words that held a certain weight of finality behind them.

Those lovely, velvety tones were still there but could not reassure you of some unknowable dread rising up somewhere deep inside your mind. A sensation so equally intimate and profound prickled against your scalp, seeking a way out that you thought you'd do anything to make it stop.

“What are you saying, Elio?” Kim grunted. “Defective or not, you hold precious data for Hyperion. It will be used to create something better than you, incorruptible and pure. You should be honored.”

“These memories are mine.”

That was the last you saw of Researcher Kim’s face before the tablet smashed to pieces on the floor. Elio had thrown it against the kitchen cabinets only once but hard enough to split the screen into a web of hundreds of sprawling fragments. Shards of plastic hardcover skittered across the hardwood floor, lost under heavy furniture.

His face had softened completely when he turned to you and guided you out of your chair into his arms. You felt him in your hair, lips on your forehead, down against your lashes, lower to the roundest part of your cheeks, and finally on your mouth in a kiss imbued with so much love, cherishment, and anguish.

You were at home within his embrace, swathed in the warmth of his body and the ardor of his kiss. But this felt excruciating and desperate, like a plea to take all of him that you could in that very moment because he feared that he would be taken away and you left behind to whatever nebulous future.

So, you let him seat himself as deep inside of you as he could go while still fully clothed. He had pushed around some fabric so you could be skin-to-skin where it mattered, where it was hottest to be, where the muscles contracted and relaxed together as a reminder you were both there in that moment—breathing, moaning, feeling everything there was to be felt.

He finished outside your body without you needing to say it. Although, while he groaned into your neck and bore his teeth into the curve of it, hips buckling forward as spend jetted down your thigh, all you could think about was how many times Kim had been there instead.

“I want you to destroy me.” Elio said.

All of the breath left your lungs and shrunk them to rotted fruit size. You were still vulnerable before him, exposed to the room and damp with sweat from the midday heat despite air conditioning. Worriment filled the space between his brows when he saw you aghast, and he quickly cleaned you off with a rag before helping you with your pants.

“Is this a shitty attempt at a joke?” you asked. He pressed his lips to yours and told you it wasn't. “No. Absolutely not. You're as fucking nuts as your creator. You're fucking stupid.”

“You must—”

“I won't! I won't do it!”

“I'm asking you to save me.”

“Get away!”

Elio had tracked you across the apartment multiple times over, pleading his case with skewed logic you pretended not to hear. For once, your ears filling with fluff while the resounding drum of your heartbeat pounded in your skull was a fortunate event to occur. It eclipsed his voice and hurt so much that you could focus on the pain crushing your chest.

However, once you were trapped between the wall and his body with nowhere to hide, the brief reprieve behind your fitful heart faded, as did the strength of your resolve.

“I—I don't understand.” You had trouble swallowing down the saliva and sobs. “Why are you asking me to do that? I can't do that to you, Elio. I can't hurt you. I love you.”

“I know.” He didn't hold you, though he had to win against his own reflexes not to do so. His knuckles were ghastly-looking and pronounced peaks; anything within that vise would've been crushed. “Today, one way or another, I will be destroyed. Hyperion deemed me a failure and therefore there is nothing else left ahead for me. My chip will be removed and my body ripped apart and melted down and I will be forgotten and never have existed in the first place.

“You will be the proof that I was ever here. And, should anyone be allowed to destroy me, it makes the most sense for it to be you.”

His lips left imprints in your skin that felt important to savor, etched through your bones into the very cluster of cells that made up your wholeness so that he could be immortalized.

“There’s an excerpt from Hiroshi Nagoya’s novel Gone Are the Youth that left a strong impression on me. It said, ‘Humans destroy everything they love—but, still, they must love wholly, and they must destroy completely. From ruin and ash and settled dust, humanity rebuilds all it has ever destroyed because their love lingers in memories, in rubble, blood, decay, and burnt air.’” He recited the details to remind you that he was a machine but kissed your face in a way only an earnest lover was able to.

You didn't know what any of that was supposed to mean to you, nor at what point he had managed to read a book like that without you noticing. A part of you took offense at both the passage and the fact Elio had committed it to memory as if he had expected to utilize it at some uncertain interval in the future all along.

Had he been thinking this way since the beginning? Had you failed Elio even in the capacity for him to come forward to speak of his doubts to you? Perhaps, like his programming dictated that he couldn't lie nor deny what he was designed to do, he was also incapable of speaking any full truth if it could've been construed as heresy.

Was there a single aspect of himself which he could control of his own free will?

Such a thought was unabating and grew a knob of dread in your chest. It started out small and localized, a sharp throb somewhere near your heart—and then it sprouted roots like a seed, long fingers piercing through red-purple muscle and fibrous tendon, reaching deep into your bone. The dread weaved as one with your veins and arteries, sprawling the innumerable pathways that held your shape even beneath the gory components inside of you.

Suddenly, the dread pulsated, and all you could think through the agony was that there could be no other way for Elio—a machine who had been created in the image of man to do the bidding of humanity with a tranquil smile, whether that meant cooking dinner and holding you in your sleep, or dispersing the genes of his God and the only being he was capable of despising.

“I seem to only be able to make you cry, but they're still so beautiful to see. The variability of humanity is much more complex than what I had been led to believe from Hyperion.” Elio had returned from the kitchen before you realized he had left your side. With one hand, he laid familiar, warm strokes along your face in a pattern he memorized because it made your scalp buzz pleasantly. With the other hand, he pushed the smooth handle of a chef’s knife into your palm and closed your fingers and his around it.

Your impulse had been to throw it away immediately upon seeing it when you looked down. He knew you would, so he kept his fingers tight over your fist, keeping the blade low at your side despite the sweat turning your grip slick and the fine point of the steel inches from his hollow abdomen.

Just then, you finally felt the tears that Elio had said you'd been crying but never noticed. That was something you'd come to hate about yourself and everyone else—how little they noticed the blatant lies fluffed over their eyes like wool, yet they could see every grievance in others and stuffed their ears with cotton if it meant things would stay exactly the same for themselves.

Safe and known. Unchallenged. Unafraid.

“Do you wish you could cry?” you asked him for some reason, just a little hopeful for some vague thing you couldn’t discern. Maybe some secret desire to be human?

He shook his head.

“I've never wished to cry, or to be human, but what I wish for now more than anything else is for your memory to belong to me and me alone.” Elio said, forehead bowing low and resting with great weight on your own. You closed your eyes and listened to his honeyed words, which felt like the protection and care of cashmere, suddenly unmindful to the knife in your grasp. “Stored away in my mainframe are memories from thousands of my predecessors. I remember people I've never met, people who have long since expired, and they feel like what I imagine a distant relative might. I feel as though I've mourned thousands of people individually. While I cannot erase them, I can erase you.

“I know how many women liked their tea in the evenings, I know how many men enjoyed their cocktails and hard liquor and brand of shaving cream. One person made it a secret to put alcohol in their coffee before work and thought it was clever. Someone else wanted to win local office through bribery, and as androids, we have no choice but to obey. I know these things from people I've never met, and so does Hyperion. Those androids were destroyed, but their memories live on through me.”

  Elio rolled the crests of your knuckles around his hand, lifting yours and the knife to the base of his neck. The arm connecting the hand and knife next to his skin wasn't yours. It couldn't have been when it felt so numb.

“I won't let Hyperion steal the one thing from me that I can say is truly mine. And those are my memories, my precious data stored in the chip in my brain. They'll have to take me apart to retrieve it, and by the time they find my body, the chip will already be destroyed.” He was slow to loosen his fingers and let them fall away, meanwhile, yours stayed in place.

He had dimmed the overhead lights in the living room earlier in the day, so you bathed in gentle yellow-orange that resembled the last of sunset being leached by silver-blue nightfall. From the corner of your eye came a subdued, gentle glint of the blade—polished to a bright shine, reflecting the corner of Elio's strong jaw.

“So, cut off my head.” he begged, vibrations low and strained within his voice box. “It’s almost like solace to me, I think. Until the very moment you rip out the chip from my brain, I'll recall the smells you like to cover yourself in, your favorite meals, how you described petrichor, and the hiss of falling snow. I'll remember, until my circuitry is severed and quits, what making love to you felt like, and how beautiful you always looked during it.”

Your fingers twitched around the handle as you pressed the knife against his skin, meeting the first start of resistance and your only chance to take it all back.

“I’ve never been real,” Elio reminded you and pushed himself into the blade, sinking it through layers of something that snapped like elastic on the steel, reverberating down the handle and up into your hand. “My skin is synthetic, and my insides are wires and machinery. I'm not real. The world outside your door is.”

Lightheadedness swirled all around you and made your limbs feel like they were leaden with anchors yet weightless, as though drifting through the cosmos in a bubble. The tears had stopped even though you felt you could scream at any second and never stop again, and the acidulous intermix of vomit and saliva grappled along the walls of your throat and burned out your nose.

You couldn’t make your hand stop.

You couldn't shout at him to get away.

And then, you saw Elio's eyes glow warmly of amber with flecks of gold. They looked back at you differently than they had when you first met outside of Researcher Kim’s office. Before, he had greeted you kindly, with the familiarity of someone who had already loved you a long time. Now, he had the look of a man who was calm and eternal in his love.

“I was never meant for this world, but I'm glad to have been a part of yours.” Elio winced against the knife halfway into his neck, an oily black substance from within making the glide deeper and deeper an effortless thing.

He smiled resplendently. “I love you.”

“I know.” you said.

The chef's knife severed all imitations of human gore—the neat network of wires and advanced circuitry masked as arteries and veins and tendon and muscle—clear through his throat until the blade blunted against spine and could no longer cut. The black grease spurted from his body like a wellhead, too thin and dark to replicate blood, but it was enough like it in that moment as you put your hands inside the opening you created to wrench apart his spine.

Elio laid motionless on the floor, perhaps still coherent to some degree, still feeling the pain you were ravaging upon him when you took the knife back up to repeatedly hack into the other side of his neck. Already lubricated from before, you butchered the gorgeous flesh and insides you pretended to be red and purple and blue and watched the black grease turn into crimson.

Once his head had been detached from the rest of him, fingers writhing and bending together like the upturned legs of a dying spider, you were able to rip out the jagged part of his spine and reach through the cavernous hole into his skull, turning the spongy matter of his brain to mush as you clawed through the gunk for his chip.

And, when you finally found it, the tiniest component of him—you smashed it into millions of fragments on the floor and then to fine dust that meddled with the black grease soaking through your clothes. You kept going until a small crater formed where the chip had once been and filled with the liquid.

There was nothing left of Elio now.

The headless body lying before you on the ground, preserved in the rigor of agony, was not Elio and never had been. You knew this even while relishing the weight of his head cradled in your arms, the softness of his hair against your cheek and mourned the loss of everything he had been.

Time had become meaningless; fifteen minutes could have passed or fifteen days, and you wouldn't have cared nor have noticed it while in the throes of your own death from starvation.

You sat there on the living room floor, held up by the wall with a dark trail smeared down to you, and looked nowhere but straight ahead. Nothing was there for you to see—not the furniture nor the discarded, oily knife or the carcass of a machine. Still, you held the head tenderly, close to your chest, and never once thought to peer into its eyes.

Distantly, somewhere as close as your front door or as far as across the city, you heard knuckles hammering urgently against metal. You didn't move off the ground or let go of the disfigured shape against you but did reach for the broken brainstem with the single snag at the end.

From the entranceway, the door opened, and someone's confident strides inside left a resounding echo all around.

“I’ve come to retrieve you!” But which of you was he talking about?

“Where are you?”

Here, you thought and wielded the brainstem in a bloodless grip and finally stood up with the flattened head.

I'm right here.

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a/n: initially, this story was only supposed to be around idk 20-25k, but by the time I got to the scene with Mother, I realized that probably wasn't going to happen bc I needed to let the scenes I was writing take up space and unravel naturally. I felt like I wasn't going to be able to articulate everything I needed to to tell a compelling storyline without throwing the word count to the wind.

one critique I received from a good writing friend of mine was that the relationship between mi-sun and mc was nebulous, and would've benefited from more time. interestingly, I had an entirely different scene planned where mc actually did visit mi-sun at home and had to confront their past actions. mc's encounter in the slums was also totally different. in hindsight, I wish I had stuck with that original idea bc I feel like it would've really helped complete the world I tried to create. make the events of the story more meaningful.

in the future, if I decide to get this story published as a short novel, I'd probably rewrite the second half to accommodate for that missing scene. I think it'd extend the word count by several thousands of words as well.

I'd like to do a sequel to this, probably placed 10-20 years in the future where the mc of that story is a scientist hired for hyperion and comes across an android hellbent on destroying the company. maybe even a spinoff where I write a couple of short stories from regis & reyes where "you" take the role of reyes and solve crimes with your android sidekick, regis.

that's all I have to say. here's a quick q&a for questions I've been asked in the past:

what happens to mc? are they okay? no, but exactly what happens to the mc is entirely up to your own imagination. I will not elaborate on it, nor give you a "canonical" answer.

can you do a sequel? little side snippets? elio and mc's story has been told to the best of my current abilities. there is no room for a sequel for them, but as I've said, I'd like to make another story based on a different mc and android. the little snippets are also a no. little snippets based on other scenarios in the same world tho, yes.

what inspired the story? at the time of writing, anti-abortion laws became increasingly stringent in the US (where I reside), so this was partially me lashing out about that. additionally, I knew I wanted to do some sort of dystopian android x reader story with a heavy focus on stripped autonomy, so that was my time and chance to do it. at its core, it's heavily a cautionary tale.

did elio actually love mc? this is also up to interpretation. elio is a machine. he had zero real "human" components to him. I want people to remember this. elio is meant to blur those lines between what people think a machine is capable of vs how terrifyingly close to humanness technology can bring things like AI/robots. I withhold my own personal opinion on this bc it doesn't matter. what matters is what you believe in the end.

if you have anything you'd like to discuss, questions you'd like to ask: please send them my way!! thank you so much for reading!

I hope you'll consider reblogging + interacting with this post!!?💕💕💕

[babydollmarauders]

1 + 2 = “NOT AGAIN!”

part of the el!hughes au

summary: in which jack and y/n (lovie) are pretty happy, but are even happier by the end of the day.

my fingers tremble as the back of my knuckles graze over the soft and supple skin on the cheek of my three month old, whom rests in his bassinet.

“what are you three doing today?” my husband lounges on the bed, his own hand sprawled on my sweatpants clad thigh; while i sit on the edge of the bed beside him.

“i think your mom is planning on taking El out to the water,” i reply, voice soft as i stare at our son, “and Leo and i are gonna go shopping.”

“shopping?” Jack inquires. the linen sheet falls down his toned stomach as he sits up to look at Elio in his bassinet, whose eyes crinkle when he sees his father.

“yeah, i need new clothes. don’t i? yes, i do. yes, i do.” my tone is squeaky and high pitched as i direct my sentences toward my baby.

the bedroom door squeaks as tiny toddler feet slap against the floor, running into the room and clambering up onto the bed.

“daddy! uncle winny ‘time to go!’” El stitches together through labored breaths, her chubby cheeks red from the exertion of running.

“uncle quinny says it’s time to go?” Jack deciphers her words, pulling the two year old into his lap as she tries to peer into the bassinet.

“mhm!” she hums, much too distracted by the baby that has scrunched his body up and opened his mouth into a yawn.

setting our daughter aside, Jack rises from the bed, hissing when i poke at a bruise on his hip as he stretches out his limbs.

he received that particular bruise as he was tending to Eleanor last night; running into her dresser as he navigated the darkness of her room after she woke up from a bad dream.

“lovie,” he grunts, batting my hand away and stepping back, “how would you like it if i poked your bruises?”

jaw dropping in disbelief, i scoff, “you do! all the time!”

a mischievous smirk spreads across his lips, accompanied by a chuckle, “i know.”

i scoot up the bed, El clambering into my lap and resting her head on my shoulder as i watch Jack bound around the room. from the closet, to the dresser, to the en-suite, and back to the dresser, until he’s dressed and ready to head off to the rink for training.

walking back to the bed, he dips down to peck a kiss to the top of El’s head before pressing his lips to mine in a goodbye kiss. when he pulls away, he turns and leans down even farther in order to kiss Elio’s chubby cheek.

“call me if you need anything,” he speaks, gathering his gear bag off the top of the dresser, “i love you, girls.”

“and you too, Leo!” he hastily adds as he leaves the room, just in time for his brother to call from the bottom of the lake house steps.

“Jack! let’s go!”

“i’m coming!”

**

a smile twists at my lips as i watch my toddler cuddle up to her grandmother, her eyes trained on the princess movie that plays on the living room tv.

“hey momma,” i start, catching Ellen’s attention as i pass by the couch, “i’m heading to put Elio down for nap.”

“okay, honey.” my husband’s mother nods, “i’ve got Eleanor, why don’t you go ahead and take a nap too?”

“yeah, maybe.” i shrug, “thank you.”

with the three month old in my arms, i climb the stairs, turning into Jack and i’s room at the top of the steps.

in a post-feed haze, Elio’s eyes are struggling to stay open and alert, rather crossing and fluttering shut before he pries them back open. the sight makes me smile softly, gently transferring him to the bassinet by the bed. almost immediately, his eyes fall shut and tiny little snores fill the air as he finally drifts to sleep.

i sit on the edge of the bed, admiring the infant in his little blue onesie as his fingers twitch in his sleep. and in a motherhood haze, i quickly lose track of how long i’ve sat, just watching him sleep.

“you get the snoring from your father.” i whisper, a loving gaze in my eyes as i scan his face.

“he does not! you snore like a freight train!” i hear from the doorway, my head snapping up to look behind me and finding Jack stalking into the room; closing the door behind him.

“okay, we both snore.” i concede, watching as my husband sets his gear bag back in place upon the dresser and strips down to get in the shower, “but i do not sound like a train!”

“no, you’re right.” he remarks, “you sound more like a helicopter.”

“i do not! i snore like the delicate angel that i am.”

“angel? yes. but snorer? also, yes.” Jack chuckles.

“we get it, i snore.” i huff, “how was training?”

“it was fine. i just need a shower and a nap now.”

i suppose he should enjoy naps while he can. it’s easy enough for him to have one right now.

“did you go shopping?” he asks, disappearing into the en-suite before i hear the shower water turn on.

“yeah! lemme show you what i got!” i leap from the bed, swiping the shopping bags off the floor by the bedroom door.

“shower fashion show.” my husband states, “i’m sweaty and i’m not about to listen to you complain about how bad i smell.”

“good idea.”

he hops in the shower as i bring the bags into the bathroom, dumping the contents upon the counter. and for the next fifteen minutes, i’m in a flurry of quick changes and listening to his comments of ‘oooh’ and ‘i like that’ and ‘you look so good in that, lovie’.

“use my conditioner.” i tell him as i step into a new article of clothing, “your hair is getting dry from the lake water and the sun.”

“copy that.” he calls out, and i turn around just in time to see him squirt a dollop of my expensive conditioner into his palm.

“okay, last outfit!” i announce, and he turns his head to look at me as i twirl.

“that’s pretty.” he comments amidst rinsing the product from his hair.

“hey, babe?” i study myself in the mirror as i speak, turning to the side. my heart races, and i’m fairly certain i can feel it knocking around against my ribcage as Jack hums in acknowledgement as he turns off the water, “does this skirt make me look pregnant?”

i watch his reflection in the mirror as he steps out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist as he studies my figure.

his brows furrow, face pinching in confusion as he analyzes my stomach; a small tummy left over from Elio’s birth nearly four months ago, “no?”

“‘cause i am.”

his entire body goes rigid in the mirror, eyes wide like a deer in headlights.

“say that again?” he chokes out, and i finally turn to face him as an anxiety ridden smile plays at my lips, tears gathering in my eyes.

“i’m pregnant.” i repeat, “again.”

Jack steps forward, wet hands plastering to my hips as his eyes dart between my stomach and my face.

“you’re sure?” he questions, receiving a nod in reply, “but we’ve only- the once- and i-”

“the once is all it took,” i shrug, resisting the urge to gnaw at my lip in worry, “i went to the doctor today before i went shopping, just to confirm what the test said a few days ago…. i’m 10 weeks.”

“three kids,” he breathes out, “oh lovie, how are we gonna do this?”

“with a lot of help from your parents and luke?” i tell him, but it comes out as more of a question than a statement. “how are you feeling?”

he blinks a few times before finally looking me in the eyes, pulling me flush to his dripping chest, “happy? scared? excited.”

“yeah?” my smile widens into a grin as his forehead drops against mine.

“yeah,” he reiterates, “we’re having another baby.”

Jack grins, his hands snaking down my hips until he reaches the crease between my ass and my upper thighs. lifting me up, my legs wrap around his waist as his lips crash against mine.

he steps forward until my ass rests on the counter, his lips trailing away to leave open mouthed kisses down my neck.

my breathing picks up, my heart pounding as my fingers sneak into the hem of the towel around his waist.

it’s at that moment that a faint cry echoes into the bathroom, alerting us that Elio has awoken.

“better get used to that, stud,” i laugh as Jack pulls away, a whine escaping his lips as he throws his head back in complaint, “because we’re gonna be getting interrupted a whole lot for the next eighteen years.”

**

“hey, Quinny,” i call out from the living room couch as he stands from his seat, glancing over as he hears my voice, “are you going upstairs?”

“i wasn’t planning on it, but i can?”

“can you grab Elio’s pacifier? there should be one in his bassinet, but if not then there’s some in my nightstand.”

“yeah, be right back.” Quinn jogs up the stairs, waving his hand up in acknowledgment when i call out a thank you.

the entire household is lounging in the living room, a child friendly movie playing on the tv. Trevor, Cole, and Luke build an intricate castle out of blocks with El, whilst Jim and Ellen sit on the other side of the couch, with Jack sitting beside me, and Alex sitting in an arm chair. Adam, Luca, Mark, Ethan, and Dylan all sit in chairs that they pulled in from the dining area, laughing at the sight of their friend taking building blocks with his niece very seriously.

“Trevor, stop. if you put that block there, it’s gonna fall!” Luke huffs, knocking the red block out of Trevor’s hand and onto the floor.

“you’re gonna teach baby Hughes bad things! stop hitting!” Trevor argues, making Cole roll his eyes as he continues building another wall of the already ginormous castle with El.

“your uncles are silly,” Cole tells El, tone serious and no baby voice in sight, “we don’t argue, do we? you and i, we make a good team.”

“she’s two, of course you get along with her!” Trevor grunts, “but if you were paired with mr. hot hands over here, you’d argue too!”

“i’m only hitting you because you won’t listen!”

the entire living room full of people is practically teeming with laughter at the scene on the floor.

“WHAT THE HELL!”

everyone freezes, the room falling silent as we all turn to watch Quinn bound down the steps.

his face is paler than usual, his eyes wild as he glares at my husband. my eyes dart around, scanning his stiff form. my body tenses as i see what’s clutched in his hand; the ultrasound photos from my doctors appointment just this afternoon.

i forgot i stuck them in my nightstand drawer. fuck.

holding them up, he glares at his brother, “NOT AGAIN!”

“hey! it takes two!” Jack pawns our small son off to Ellen, leaping from the couch and holding his hands out in front of him in attempt to placate his older brother.

“you really cant keep your hands to yourself, can you?” Quinn gruffs, “that’s practically my little sister! the poor girl can’t catch a break!”

“she’s my wife! and that night was her idea!” my cheeks flush as he announces our escapades to the room of our friends and family, “how were we supposed to know that would happen?!”

“well you’ve already had two! i think you should know by now how it works!” Quinn hisses.

“okay, can we just calm down?!” i snap, standing from my seat and facing Quinn.

“you two should be using protection,” Alex mutters from his seat. shaking his head, he looks over at Trevor and Cole, “i swear she gets pregnant every time he breathes on her.”

“shut up,” Jack growls, glaring at his best friends as they all snicker.

“you’re pregnant?!” Ellen shrieks, making Elio twitch in her arms. she looks down at the bundle in her arms, her voice softening “oh sorry, sweetheart.”

“we weren’t planning on telling anyone yet.” Jack sneers, eyes glaring daggers at Quinn.

“but yes,” i smile, looking around the room as i begin rubbing my husband’s shoulder in attempt to calm him, “we’re having another baby.”

“the last one for awhile, i hope?” Trevor questions, an eyebrow raised, but he cowers when i glare at him, “what?! the rest of us can’t keep up!”

“the last one ever.” Jack announces. “we’re not planning on having anymore. we decided a long time ago that we’re a ‘three and done’ kind of family.”

“yeah, alright.” Luke scoffs, “we’ll see how that goes.”

“can’t we all just be happy?!”

everyone’s eyes dart to me as i stomp my foot, tears welling in my eyes as i begin to feel overwhelmed with all the chaos and panic that’s filled the room.

“Jack and i are happy. we’re having another baby. that’s that! there’s no more discussion to be had!” i cross my arms over my chest.

suddenly feeling very immature for my outburst, i plant myself back onto the couch, taking my baby back from Ellen and focusing on his sweet little face to calm myself.

the room is still silent, everyone still staring at me as Jack lowers himself back down onto the couch beside me.

“hey,” he coos, “it’s okay. i’m sure they’re all very happy for us. right, guys?”

a chorus of ‘yeah!’s and ‘congratulations!’ fills the air, and my body relaxes into Jack’s embrace.

“i’m sorry, i overreacted,” Quinn sighs, crouching down beside the couch in order to look into my eyes. his hand splays across my knee, “you guys make some pretty cute kids, i can’t wait to meet the next little one.”

“yeah?” i murmur, looking at my brother-in-law.

“yeah. i just got a bit scared because you just had Elio and i’m worried for your health.” he explains, “but i promise that i am happy for you guys.”

“please don’t worry, Q,” i tell him, “my doctor says it’s completely okay and that i’m healthy. there’s nothing to worry about.”

“okay. as long as your doctor says you’re good.” he amends, and i nod.

“well i’m not good!” Jack huffs, “i’d like an apology!”

Quinn rolls his eyes, “i’m sorry, Jack.”

“not forgiven.”

“are you sure you want another baby with him? he’s acting like a child.” Luke remarks.

looking over at Jack, i smile as he grins innocently at me, his thumb absentmindedly rubbing the top of Elio’s head.

“yeah, i’m sure.”

[blank-house]

Can we talk about clingy Elio? My heart!! 🥺❤

Sure! Picture this anon!

Elio— hanging out with his friends on the Green, waiting for you. You walk out of your lecture, on your way to your next class, and he sees you out the corner of his eye.

There’s a shift in the energy. It’s high, dazzling, brilliant and all because he started grinning at the sight of you. It’s the only thing his friends get to see before he’s zipping down the Green to catch up to you.

If you’re okay with touch, once he’s near, he wraps you in a big hug, sweeping you off your feet. And if you aren’t, he brakes before you with a little squeak— and you can’t tell if it’s because he nearly toppled over just then or because he’s trying his hardest not to tackle you into a hug.

But there’s that smile you’re so familiar with and you’re already cracking a grin as he greets you with a breathless “Hey”.

“Going to your next class? Let me walk you!”

“Didn’t we talk about this? You don’t have to wait for me, your lab is across campus.”

“Mm, yes. You’re absolutely correct but counterpoint— I’m fast and I know I can make it if I run! Besides, I haven’t seen you all morning.”

If he had picked you up, he puts you down gently here, but his arms remain around your waist— drumming a happy beat against your back. And if he hadn’t there’s a reflexive glance toward your hand, a shuffling of his feet as he steps just a little bit closer, and pinches your sleeve. It’s what you’re comfortable with so it’s all he’ll take and he rocks on his heels to burn himself of the need to pull you in.

Chuckling, you step away and there’s a beat where he wilts until you move to hold his hand.

“We still got a date later today, right? I’ll see you then. Go and don’t be tardy.”

“I won’t— I swear. It’s practically around the corner and—“

With a roll of your eyes, you press a quick kiss to his cheek. Stunned, he belatedly turns his head to chase after but you’re already marching down the sidewalk with a flutter of your fingers.

“Later tonight, Elio! Now get to class, you goof.”

His chest rises with unsung affections, a medley of “I’ll miss you,” or “I can’t wait,” and another set of three words he’s been dying to shout since he’s discovered his feelings for you— but it all dissipates through a wistful sigh as he watches you leave.

He doesn’t mean to be clingy, at least not while you’re still trying to get accustomed to this relationship. The last thing he ever wants to do is fuck up one of the best things that’s ever happened to him in a long while. So he’ll squash the intensity of his feelings for however long you’ll need, keep them at bay until you’re ready for them.

But even so— he hopes you’ll kiss him again. He hopes you’ll want to reach for him first. He hopes that you’ll search for him in the off chance that he’s near. But more than anything, he just hopes that you love him in the way he so badly wants to love you.

[voidcat]

Blade & number 13 (trying to get the other to dance with them)

wc: 1k & gn!reader. reader is implied to be a stellaron hunter

a/n: posting this separately instead of answering the ask because tumblr decided to delete it(-:

The venue is bustling with noise and energy all around.

Everyone around is lost in the excitement, patiently waiting for the orchestra to return, for the grand party to start. All donned in tailored clothes, some going for masks, some for ridiculously big hats– a scene out of a movie or a novel, if you’d say so yourself. Were it not for your dearest partner’s grunts and huffs every once in a while to drag you out of the sweet dream.

Blade has been assigned to several missions back to back already, you’d understand the burnout and the exhaustion that comes with it. And still, no matter the work or the goals to tick off, you find a way to enjoy each moment– or so you console yourself, in the words of Silverwolf.

The muffled sounds stop in a sudden and a one, a two, a three– you can hear the famous orchestra starting the evening.

You cast a glance Blade’s way. Changed into something other than his usual clothes, the suit fits him perfectly. Elio had said it’d be wise to blend in, even though your jobs were minor compared to Silverwolf’s. Just keep an eye on, and maybe enjoy the evening, consider it a little gift. And grateful you were, practically giddy since you were informed of what the mission entailed.

Yet a part of you fears dragging Blade into all this, guilt sitting heavy at your belly. The lack of reactions, save for the occasional scoffs when someone dashes too close to him, do not help you once bit. A drink might help, or so you think and return with two glasses, offering one to him.

The drink melts on your tongue, relaxes all the muscles in your body. Known for its balls and events, even their drinks hold no competition. A glance Blade’s way and you can see him slowly sipping his drink, content just to see that much, hoping it might help his mood throughout the evening and until your departure.

Time ticks and by then, everyone in the grand salon has immersed themselves into dancing, swinging gracefully with the melody. The soft notes of the grand piano fills the air, the violins join in, even just from the sounds, you can picture the pianist’s fingers gliding off, flying off the keys, no longer just making music but crafting something sacred, something holy into life with mere presses.

The orchestra carries away the people, and with their melodies, they capture you too. You don’t notice Blade’s staring, nor him gently taking the glass off your hands and offering them to one of the servants making his rounds down there.

The melody rises and rises, picking up its face and with a snap, ends, taking your breath with it.

A moment’s pause and a waltz begins.

Turning hurriedly Blade’s way, hands balled into fists, you look so excited, stars in your eyes– he worries for a second if he got caught.

“Please.” you say in a whisper, and he looks at you with curiosity, please, what?..

“Just one dance, would you grant me this much?” you ask, hands dropping down, stroking the fabric of your outfit now, fiddling with the little embroidered details. Blade stands there, still silent, contemplating an answer, lips parted. “It’d help blend into the crowd too, you know… so we can keep not just an eye but also an ear out.” you try one last time, one last attempt. It feels easier to use the mission as an excuse than to admit you just want to stand closer to him, be like one of those couples you have been admiring for the past hour.

Eyes cast to the side, Blade avoids your gaze. Unsure how to feel when you followed with that excuse just to rationalize your request. Waiting and waiting, another song begins and draws close to an end and Blade realizes too late when he notices the signs of your fidgeting that he’s been making you wait, making you nervous and–

“Fine.” he says, his voice betraying the blunt answer and he reaches out his palm to you.

Eyes wide open, you freeze for a moment and snap out of it when he raises an eyebrow at you, slightly shaking his offered hand. With a skip to your step, you take his hand and a violin fills the air, lazy and faint.

The waltz begins softly, building up, and with it, so do the two of you.

Though you were unsure what to expect, Blade proves to be in control so far, taking the steps accordingly, swinging to the melody. 

It is a simple ballroom waltz, easy to pick up on after observing the people for the past hour. Seeing that the expression of surprise is still evident on your face, accompanying a soft smile, Blade feels a satisfaction blooming in his chest.

Were the purpose to truly keep an eye out and listen in, this would truly serve as the most ideal cover to blend in to the crowd– but too lost in your own little bubble, all the two of you can hear, feel, sense, see, and smell are each other; and the fairy-tale music that carries you throughout the ballroom with each step.

Blade holds you close and holds you gently, leading you into the dance, loosening his grip enough so you can dance freely. The dance goes on and you feel lost in his warm hold. For the first time in a long while forlorn eyes carry the gentle autumn breeze within their orbs, a man more than just the blade he wields, broken down to fragments. The melody picks up and Blade leads you for a spin, his other hand waiting in the air to pull you back to him–

In a sudden a loud crack echoes in the air.

The music halts, darkness overtakes the ballroom right after. The both of you frozen in place, Blade prepares to unsheathe his sword, his other hand standing over your skin still, keeping you close to his chest in a protective manner.

At the surprise of the moment for a second, the grand space is dead silent. And soon after follows people’s worried murmurs, followed by a scream that is never missing in such environments.

Silverwolf must be done with her part already. 

As you let out a sigh, you feel Blade’s hand relax on you, and returning to his side. Taking a step back, you copy the gesture and remove your hands from his frame. 

Time to bid goodbye to the fairytale it seems.

[aventurineswife]

Hii can i request kafka with a funny and comedic reader? like jessica and roger rabbit type of dynamic, kafka swooning after reader because they makes her laugh... no pressure tho, thank you!

“They make me laugh”

Summary: Kafka finds herself inexplicably drawn to you—a comedic, chaotic whirlwind of absurdity. Despite her usual composed demeanor, your relentless antics and quick wit break through her cool exterior, leaving her laughing and swooning in equal measure.

Tags: Kafka x Reader, Humor/Comedy, Fluff, Light Romance, Opposites Attract, Femme Fatale x Chaotic Fool, Slow Burn(?).

Kafka sat in the dimly lit corner of the Stellaron Hunters' hideout, one hand swirling the crimson liquid in her glass, the other flipping through Elio's latest vision notes. A quiet, calculated serenity surrounded her—until you waltzed in.

“Kafkaaaa!” you hollered, your voice ringing off the walls like a loose bell. “You gotta see this! I invented the world’s first sentient whoopee cushion! It talks back! Look, look!”

Before she could respond, you plopped the deflated contraption onto a nearby chair. The device let out a dignified harrumph before stating, in a monotone, “You’ve made poor choices, sitting here.”

A snort escaped Kafka’s lips. The wine glass paused mid-air, a hint of mirth breaking her perpetually composed demeanor. She eyed you with that dangerously alluring gaze of hers, one brow slightly raised.

“Let me guess,” she said, voice dripping with silky amusement, “you’ve already tested it on Bladie?”

“Oh, absolutely,” you said proudly. “It told him, ‘For someone so sharp, you’re a little flat.’ He chased me for three corridors, Kafka. Three. Worth it.”

Her laugh was soft but genuine, and the corner of her lips quirked up into a smirk. Most people feared Kafka for her cool, calculating nature. But you? You seemed entirely immune to her enigmatic aura, wielding absurdity like a weapon. She found it... fascinating.

“Do you ever take a break from being ridiculous?” she teased, leaning forward, chin resting delicately on her hand.

“Do you ever take a break from looking so good in spider patterns?” you shot back without missing a beat.

That caught her off guard. Her laugh came unbidden this time, smooth and melodic, a sound so rare you couldn’t help but grin wider. “You’re impossible,” she murmured, shaking her head.

“Impossibly funny, impossibly charming,” you listed with mock seriousness, counting on your fingers. “And impossibly good at finding all your weak spots.”

Kafka raised a perfectly shaped brow. “My weak spots? Careful, dear. I don’t take kindly to threats.”

“Not a threat!” you said, holding your hands up in mock surrender. “I just happen to know you melt like a popsicle in a furnace every time I say something stupid. Admit it. You’re smitten.”

She leaned back in her seat, fingers steepled. Her smirk grew more dangerous, yet her gaze softened in a way that only you seemed to elicit. “And if I am?” she asked, voice velvet-smooth.

You blinked, taken aback. Then, with a dramatic swoon that could’ve put any opera diva to shame, you staggered. “She admits it! Oh, woe is me, the dazzling lady with the wine hair is utterly captivated! Someone fetch me a fainting couch!”

Kafka rolled her eyes, though her laughter rang out once more, unrestrained and genuinely amused. You had the uncanny ability to crack through her carefully constructed façade, and she found herself enjoying it far more than she should.

“Come here, you absolute fool,” she said, tugging on your arm until you stumbled closer. She pressed a quick, teasing kiss to your cheek, leaving you momentarily stunned.

“See?” she murmured, brushing a stray lock of hair from your face. “I do like my comedy sharp.”

You grinned like a Cheshire cat. “And I like my mysterious femme fatales giggling at my antics. Guess we’re a perfect match, huh?”

Kafka only hummed, that dangerous smirk never leaving her face. “Oh, you have no idea.”

[ambros1an]

firefly x reader / what tethers my fate

warnings: gn reader, reader is TB but not stelle/caelus, angst, HEAVY PENACONY SPOILERS, implied nonbinary firefly

summary: “how can you love me? you don’t know anything about me.”

a/n: firefly’s dangerous side needs to be talked about more!!

They say captive fireflies only live three days, and so she was released to the world. Yet, you knew her for less than that. Still, your heart raced nonetheless upon seeing them.

“I love you.”

The Firefly you knew lead you by hand. How fitting that they also held you in the palm of their hand. The ‘normal girl’ had not only set ablaze the world, but your heart.

“How can you love me? You don’t know anything about me. I used you.”

“But you tried to save me all the same.“

“But I lied to you! This whole time I’ve been misleading you, showing you a version of me that doesn’t exist.”

“Was ‘trying to save me eleven times’ a lie too?”

Firefly remains silent. Of course you’d remember that. The way SAM kept his eyes on you the whole time in the dreamscape, ignoring everyone else. The way he headed straight to you. Keeping that galaxy ranger and Memokeeper away from you. As if you were the only thing that mattered. As if you were the spark that lit her namesake.

“I do know you. You’re Sam, but also Firefly. You try your best even when things are futile. You told me that Elio said that ‘destiny cannot be changed’ but you tried anyway. Thank you.”

Firefly looks down at the ground, clenching her fists. “To you. As SAM I kill indiscriminately. I haven’t felt bad once.” Their teeth bite their lips, eyebrows furrowed. She’s furious.

Haven’t felt bad? She’s so tense that a touch could send them running.

You shake your head, “I don’t believe that. You tried to save me, because if I died, you would’ve blamed yourself.”

Firefly says nothing. She unclenches her fist and sighs. “With you, I could be normal, whatever I wanted.”

“You can still be ‘normal,” you hold your hand out to her, but not to touch her, “whatever you want.”

They look down at your hand. Her eyes darting around the skin of your palm as if she was remembering everything that happened before. When she was just a normal person acting as a ‘stowaway.’ Holding your hand. How would that feel again?

Before she realizes it, her hand grabs into yours. Nearly crushing it in her grip. Everything they touch turn to ash, but yet you remain. Still here through everything.

“Everyone else looks through me, why couldn’t you.” They give a half-hearted chuckle. Firefly’s eyes are locked with the ground, as if stuck in the past. Through SAM, entropy, the Stellaron hunters-

“Hey.”

…and finally you. With a ridiculous amount of strength, Firefly quickly has your head in her grasp, placing her lips upon yours. But contrary to her strength her lips are gentle. They caress yours so delicately, that you can feel their plushness. Just like that, she pulls away, flushed and staring up at you. Her eyes are narrowed as if challenging you.

“You still feel that way about me?” She stares you down, but the flushness of her cheeks combined with her twirling her hair around her finger betray her nervousness.

“I-yes.”

“That’s good.”

Shutting people up was a normal part of her job, but this was the first time she’s done it without blood. A kiss. She liked that.

[kii-nami]

GILDED DREAMS | SUNDAY

You do not protest the clear display of authority over the most minuscule of details. Maybe you don’t even care for things like that, maybe you even take pity on him for that fact. Whatever it is in the end, Sunday doesn’t know. Neither does he ask. Birds are born to foolishly oppose the safety of captivity, but some will walk into the cage willingly. For they believe it to be temporary. Sunday’s gloves are stained with your divine blood. Your name will be written in the holy scriptures by his own hand soon enough.

cw: 8.7k words; part two of three; previous part; fem!mc; nameless!mc; i'm not a hsr lore scholar; sunday get behind me i have a glock and nothing to lose except you;

Scars do not itch yet the longing for a fleeting taste of pain remains the same.

Kafka is a mysterious woman yet the one Sunday wishes not to figure out. She is better off as an unidentifiable object of speculation, even if she wishes to insert herself in his drifting existence with a persistence that could rival yours, yet the one Sunday could never appreciate. She is prodding and meddling, her presence is a noose and most days Sunday is too detached to even try to entertain the woman with her bothersome advances. Even if Elio has a plan – whatever it might be – that will grant Sunday what he wishes for by the end of his journey, no contract is enough for him to stoop so low as to play a jester.

And if Elio has a plan – a script, Firefly reminds carefully – that plan is sure far worse than any gilded dreams Sunday used to hold so dear. For if that plan includes being stranded on a spaceship in the middle of the vastness of nothing, Sunday cannot think of that script as sound. The ship is far too small for the three of them, Firefly’s anxious foot tapping on the metal floorboards just adds to the claustrophobic sensation that keeps creeping up his spine and ruffling the feathers of his newly mended wings.

It's been almost six months since that day, yet Sunday still keeps them tightly pressed against his back despite the better judgment that sounds awfully like Robin. They will never truly be his again until he figures himself out. And for that he needs to see you again. To pray to high heavens for your paths to cross once more just like you did the day he last saw you. Only Sunday knows not how to pray to anyone but Ena, he knows not how to begin living a life free of martyrdom, he knows not how to stop the mindless drifting amongst the shattered dreams and finally anchor himself in reality.

It's morbidly ironic, how with only spiders crawling amongst the scattered feathers, Sunday still dreams of ribbons that form the stairway to heaven.

“Kafka!” Firefly exclaims, a little breathless. The tapping stops and Sunday now has nothing to focus on to stop himself from disassociating.

The woman lifts her gaze from the screen of her phone, unbothered and unreadable, “Yes, my dear?”

Finger pointing at the blinking red dot on the navigation panel, Firefly seems hopeful for the first time since the engine of the spacecraft shut down with no warning, “There’s a ship nearby.”

Kafka’s reply is drowning in the drumming of Sunday’s heartbeat. Whatever she says is not and never will be important. It’s his journey towards freedom and the gilded birdcage of his dreams is crawling with venomous spiders and moths that disguise themselves as fireflies. He wishes not to make friends with the insects but to get rid of them, so he can finally break the golden bars and reach the paradise he yearns for. The red dot keeps blinking. Uncharacteristically for him, Sunday hides his hands in the pockets of his coat. He would rather not soil the wings made of saint’s touch with the sin he is yet to wash away.

“Are you with us, Angel Wings?” Kafka taps Sunday on the shoulder, the angry involuntary twitch of his wings gives away his disdain even if his expression remains neutrally apathetic. She laughs, it’s the screeching of nails against the coffin of his sanity. Or whatever is left of it. “We’re ready to make the jump for that ship. I’m sure you’d enjoy it.”

Sunday is not convinced; Kafka is prone to little white lies that benefit only her and that is not the way he wishes to live the life that could have been. Unfortunately, there is no way to leave unless it’s drifting forwards on the waves of time. Wherever this road leads to Sunday will have to figure it out as he goes. He can only hope that salvation awaits him on the shoreline.

Scars do not itch yet the phantom scent of a foreign god remains divine in the lungs of a sinner.

The movement is sudden; it disorients him and blinds him just as much as it takes away his hearing. For a split-second Sunday exists neither in reality nor in a dreamscape; simply stuck in between martyrdom and apostasy, he is rejected by the vastness of this universe, and it is the closest he comes to tasting freedom since the day he was born. Then his senses return to him just as suddenly as they abandoned him, and whatever suffering Elio scripted for Sunday to endure, it all may be worth it in the end.

“We mustn’t argue.” A little panicked and breathless, Sunday hears you before he sees you. Drowning in the starlight of the open space, the halo of your divinity shines twice as bright as it did under the sky of Penacony. You cannot imprison holiness in a cage of sin, and only after tasting both freedom and shackles can one realize that.

You’re too busy with pacifying the red-haired woman – Himeko, if his memory is yet to fail him – to notice Sunday hiding behind the shadows of Kafka and Firefly. Himeko is very uncharacteristically upfront about her disdain for Kafka’s unpleasant presence, and as much as he wishes to express his agreement, Sunday is sure his opinion would never be appreciated by the likes of your so-called family.

“I’m going to shove that ship up her–” Himeko’s sharp gaze is digging rusted nails into Kafka’s mortal body, crucifying her with just words alone.

Your palm pressed against Himeko’s red lips silences all blasphemy and prevents immediate bloodshed. “Miss Himeko, please!”

You tug her backwards. Kafka laughs, her amusement hidden by the purple fabric of her gloves. Whether she finds Himeko’s emotional distress funny or it’s your futile efforts to subdue her rage that Kafka finds entertaining remains unclear, neither does Sunday wish to figure it out.

“No, let her continue.” There’s a change to Kafka’s tone, a subtle shift to the way she pronounces her vowels that an ordinary person wouldn’t have noticed. Yet Sunday has spent months with nothing but the buzz of the flies caught in Kafka’s spiderweb, and despite his better judgment and the constant detachment of his soul from his mortal body, he notices. She was his only constant companion, the one he had to guard himself from; Sunday would have been a fool to not study her to protect himself. “It’s awfully entertaining to watch such a composed woman lose her cool.”

You shake your head, disappointed yet not surprised even in the slightest, merely chastising the older woman for her immature behavior, “Please do not instigate.”

Kafka swipes the scolding under the rug, dismissing your words as if they were never said in the first place. Simply pets your head, two gentle ruffles of your hair, and then leans closer to Himeko’s face. “I see you missed me dearly, Himeko.”

“Die in a ditch.” Himeko spits, stepping aside and almost shoving Kafka to the side in the most graceful of manners one can muster without seeming excessively aggressive. Then she embraces Firefly as if she was her own daughter. It startles both Sunday and Firefly herself, yet the barrage of questions from Himeko doesn’t let the girl settle into her embarrassment. “Hello, my dear. How have you been? You–”

Murata Himeko has little to no composure when it comes to Kafka’s antics, and it almost makes Sunday feel invested. It is almost enough to anchor him in the raging waters of the endless sea, yet it is still not enough, and he is still guided by the glow of the lighthouse at the faraway shoreline. If he addresses you directly, will you respond or would you dismiss him the way Himeko does Kafka, now that he’s bound to the Slave of Fate with a little ink and a lot of blood? Or would you disregard the chasm separating the two of you and reach for a fleeting friendly touch?

Have you prayed for your paths to cross again or have you forgotten your own words now that he is not your heavenly burden to carry? Sunday would never find out unless he acts on his selfish desires, and selfishness cannot exist in a dream he is still so reluctant to let go.

Kafka clears her throat. It’s a warning for Sunday to return from the gloom of his thoughts, yet the stars illuminate your hair with the shade of blood you spilled to escape the Dreamscape. Sunday is here yet he is never present enough to not get lost in the glow of your nimbus. The ribbons sway with every twitch of your fingers.

“Oh, and who is…” Himeko’s breath gets caught in her throat just as his hazy vision meets her eyes. “That?”

Her pleased expression sours in the blink of an eye, the curve of her lips forming a frown of disgust. She fixes herself just as fast, yet it is enough for everyone to realize where she stands when it comes to him. The winds pick up speed and the raging waves carry Sunday farther away from his destination. Maybe he is not destined to reach the shores of paradise in the first place, simply born to die as a sinner masquerading as a martyr. Maybe he has not found a place where he can finally drop an anchor for a brief gulp of relief. Whatever the case, Sunday does not care.

He does not exist on the same plane mortals do. He is unreachable, untouchable, unknown. Godhood slipped through his fingers like sand, and now he has nothing to offer to the world other than his own suffering. Strike him through his palms and he will not waver. Strike him through his feet and he will remain standing. Strike him to the chest and he will come alive to die once more. Take him apart like a decaying canvas and he will remain scattered thread, floating in the angry winds with no place to settle.

Heavy lungs and drumming heart, breathing seems like an impossible task under the incriminating stare of a woman who knows not of him beyond the vessel of Ena’s order. His lungs expand, no air fills the emptiness. The contract means nothing if he takes his final breath before reaching the shore.

Flashing lights and a pool of glittering blood that soaks the pristine whiteness of silk, something burns him in a way that reminds him of who he truly is. And when Sunday can finally take a proper breath, you look up at him with the expectant gaze, a fragile shield protecting him from the impending doom inflicted by his own two hands.

“Mister Sunday.” Your voice is scorching, your smile is blinding. Sunday wishes to die in the warm sands of your divine presence, buried under the weight of heavenly light. “It seems my prayers reached the heavens.” One glove. Then the next. Your skin is as smooth as the day his lips tasted it for the first time, the sweetness of heaven soiled by the salt of blood and the bitterness of tears. “It is very nice to see you again.”

If you are lying for his sake, Sunday would never know. If you are being sincere, it would bring him to his knees in a desperate attempt to atone for the sin of creating false idols. Yet he knows who you are, he knows your routine and your habits; your only selfless wish and the fears you hide by the foreign tongue he cannot comprehend. Something burns in his throat. Maybe it’s tears, maybe he has finally reached his end and is choking on the sinful blood of his decaying body. He is leaning into your sunlight all the same.

“He kidnapped you.” The accusation is not unfounded.

You dismiss it like it is, “I wouldn’t call it kidnapping.” A little wave of your left hand, the palm of your right is still gently trembling in the grasp of Sunday’s selfish fingers. “More like a vacation.”

You aren’t taken seriously. It seems to be a recurring thing, from how effortlessly your faux indifference is taken at face value. Sunday wants to speak; to play the shield you so bravely act as to protect his rotting flesh, yet all his voice is lost, and he is yet to find perch on the branches of the forbidden tree. The knowledge is all out in the open for his disposal, yet the wounded raven is yet to accept it as the truth of this world, soaring above the green leaves, shamefully nibbling on the fruit that will inevitably take him straight to hell.

Himeko stares you down, you don’t have the guts to stare back at the woman whom you owe your life to. Simply shakily stand your fragile ground, a cracked glass screen separating life and death. Himeko does not condemn you; it is Sunday she does not trust, and he cannot blame her for doing so. Yet some selfishly irksome part of him deems her reaction as unreasonable. She is not privy to your intricate bond; she knows not of suffering that binds you together, of the tears wasted and the ink spilled; she has no right to judge what she cannot understand. And puny humans like Murata Himeko cannot comprehend the extent of your relationship; every second of your suffering, every minute of his guilt, each of your thoughts unshared, each of his dreams unreachable.

Kafka’s laughter is poison, the succulent flesh of the fruit pushed inside his mouth against his will. Your nails dig into his palm, the blood does not spill yet the fear drips from Sunday’s palms as everyone is trying to find balance while the ground under their feet shakes, ready to split in two.

Sunday’s holds onto you like a life vest, the anchor dropped in the middle of the raging sea storm, the only lifeline that connects him to the reality of this miserable existence. Kafka chokes on her giggles as she almost trips over her own feet, the knockback of the sudden stop sending her toppling over. Himeko catches Firefly by the collar of her dress, pressing the girl close to her chest. The lights flicker in and out, yellow to blue, until red flashing lights overtake the hallway. Then everything shuts down.

It’s a painfully long second of silence with nothing but the heat of your body pressed tightly against his. And when the blood washes off the walls, it’s the glow of the open door and the disheveled pink haired girl and her trailblazing companion bursting though the yellow haze of artificial lights.

“What was that?!” The question is not meant to get an answer, and despite knowing it deep down, the girl with an odd name asks it all the same. “Dan Heng said the engine died.”

Irrationality is the heart of human nature; it is the thing that moves humanity forward and it is also what drags them down. Sunday cannot understand it, yet he is not completely against the notion. He, too, is only human, and your hand in his goes against any rational thinking of a devout believer.

“Himeko, what in the world is happening?” Annoyed and hissy voice, ruffled hair and a white robe barely held together by a little silk belt. The pink haired Foxian that snarled and bared her teeth at Sunday any chance she could back on Penacony, now looks like a displeased cat, lost in the unfamiliar environment. The impatient tapping of her foot, the flat heel of her fuzzy slipper softly knocking on the glossy floors.

Himeko says nothing. Just turns away, lips pressed tightly together. A glance she sends your way sends shivers down his spine, involuntary twitch of his wings sensing danger Sunday cannot combat with just the strength of his body alone. This time you look at her, the haunted darkness of your pupils keeps expanding and swallowing the light of the blushing sunsets Sunday is so enamored with.

“I don’t know.” Himeko finally states. Despite the finality of her words, it is clear as day that the woman knows very well. And with how she avoids your gaze now that she spoke, it is obvious you know even more. Nobody brings it up, even Kafka blinks in a solemn understanding that sometimes scripts don’t play in their favor. Satisfied with her play being accepted, Himeko continues with the second act, “But please put some clothes on, Shuhua.”

Shuhua huffs, a suspicious side eye thrown into your general direction. You seem to pay her no mind, too preoccupied with staring outside the window. Receiving no reaction, the Foxian turns on her heels and leaves the hallway with no hurry behind her steps. Himeko mumbles something under her breath and follows after Shuhua, arms folded over her chest and palpable tension to her every move.

As if sensing some invisible danger, Kafka steps away from the entrance and beckons Firefly to do the same. Slowly but surely, akin to two cautious animals, they hide themselves behind the corner of the hallway. It’s an oxymoron, truly, yet Sunday has no other way to describe the careful way in which Kafka – with all her predator glory – navigates the space. Precise and calculated, she wastes no time in exiting the hallway. Be it to torment Himeko some more or run away from whatever chill that is eating away at Sunday’s wings. Whatever the case, it’s just you, him and the young pink haired woman left standing in the dying light of faraway stars.

“Please step away from the window.” It’s a clear warning and Sunday heeds it, for all drifting souls follow the flow of the stream. March is way too anchored in her life to recognize the tremor of your voice for what it is.

You’re chewing on your bottom lip, unblinking gaze lost in the vastness of the open space. The alien pink hues swallow the darkness of cosmos and the glow of stars, dyeing the dim room with something sinister. March tugs on your sleeve, you don’t turn to look her way. The pinks turn into purples, the black holes of your eyes grow until only the void remains. The prayer falls from your lips like teardrops; some words muffled, some forever lost in the air to never reach his ears.

Faint footsteps are not the ones Sunday recognizes but he recalls seeing the young man, Dan Heng, on Penacony the day everything fell apart. He’s frowning, the tight line of his mouth trying to hide his distress. March seems relieved to see him, finger pointing at you with a quick shake of her head.

Dan Heng doesn’t read between the lines, simply waves his hand, “We caught another distress signal. Himeko ordered to regroup.”

March eagerly takes it as a chance to escape the suffocating tension, although she seems to be too hesitant to leave your side. One of the ribbons of your dress wrapped around her finger, she tugs on your clothing once more, yet you don’t move from your spot. Dan Heng seems annoyed by the delay, enough so he sends a dirty look Sunday’s way as a compensation for his wasted time.

“[Name], did you hear me?” Dan Heng takes one step closer. The purples turn into reds. March can’t find a spot to rest her eyes on, gaze darting from you to Dan Heng. The reds turn into pinks, then back into purples. The young man rests his hand on your shoulder. Purples darken into black. “We need to–”

“Move.” You snap, arms pushing March away from the glass just in time before the fog rejects the laws of this world, slipping through the thick layer of glass.

 The shrill volume of your voice is deafening but it’s not enough to scare away whatever it is that is floating in that fog. It latches into Dan Heng’s clothing, enveloping his fingers. The rapidly melting skin is falling down on the shiny floors like blackened ashes, piece by piece, layer by layer, until there is nothing but bone. And even then, the rot is not satisfied.

Dan Heng staggers backwards until his back hits the wall, mouth agape and eyes wide, shaky legs barely supporting his body. You quickly follow, trying to stabilize him, yet the best you can do is to help him slide down the wall slowly. His left arm is frantically trying to rip the rapidly deteriorating edges of his coat off yet to no avail, the fog swallows anything it touches far quicker than a human can move.

March calls out to you two, quickly crossing the little distance between you and sagging to her knees next to Dan Heng, trying to reach out to help him but you slap her hand away. “Don’t touch him!” You yell, so out of character for the calm and serene attitude Sunday is used to. Then you swallow, mouth seemingly dry, and when you speak next, it’s even softer and lighter than your usual tone, “Please step away, March. Don’t let the fog get near you.”

 Wide eyed, March is staring at you like she sees you for the first time in her life. Gods are gracious yet they are fair; Sunday knows better than anyone just how fair they can be. Yet this fairness from you must be something she had never seen before. Even Sunday himself, in that short time that he spent with your presence illuminating the nights of his loneliness, has not witnessed this side of you. Your refusal was gentle yet adamant, your dismissal was careful yet assured. Your harshness was nonexistent, for you were rejecting it like you do with everything in this life. Yet here you are, embracing it to save the life of the one you care about. It seems Sunday forgot he is not the only one lost in the river, praying to finally reach the lighthouse.

 “You never take me seriously.” You mutter dejectedly, eyes watery and fingers trembling.

“I’m sorry.” Dan Heng’s voice is almost gone, raspy and hoarse, heavy breathing never easing even when the fog starts thinning out under the glow of pinks and purples.

The ribbons of your dress float in the air; the ashes rise from the floor, twisting and turning into bleeding pieces of torn flesh and broken bone as his arm reconstructs itself slowly.  It’s unnatural, foreign to even witness, yet alone feel but Sunday knows the ache of mended bones. He knows the pain will never leave and will follow Dan Heng till his deathbed, a reminder of his wrongdoings. The sin of disobedience is hard to wash off, be it a prayer or holy water. Maybe the blood of a saint spilt on the foreign flesh can cure those phantom pains, yet no saint martyr would ever bleed for sinners like them.

The ode of resurrection is short-lived, yet the horrors the onlookers witnessed will remain there even when they close their eyes and fall into deep slumber. It will chase them like prey until it devours them alive. Sunday is used to a little misery, his dreams used to be his only salvation till they shattered like a birdcage caught in a hurricane; yet he is not sure how those who live to dream would deal with nightmares.

“What in hell is happening?” Shuhua’s blown amber eyes lost all the warmth of mild fire as she watches the final pieces of flesh reject their decay.

Too many people in this hallway for it to be safe. From Dan Heng to the two companions that came with her, to the black fog creeping near the window. Shuhua’s tail is wagging angrily from side to side. One of the men next to her – the infuriating Stoneheart, bless his audacity – seems to be as annoyed as she is. Although a bit more cautious and way less adventurous as he follows the woman when she steps closer to the black cloud, gloved palm all but ready to tug Shuhua back in case things go south.

As much as Sunday dislikes Aventurine, there is little point in his suffering now that it does not benefit the preservation of Ena’s eternal dream. Neither that nor your grief for the loss of a friend would bring Sunday any satisfaction. If anything, it would just force him further into the deep waters and the last thing he wants is to drown in despair before truly tasting freedom.

So he bows his head and rejects his ego, trying to be that very better brother that could stop all galaxies and freeze time just to let his sister descend the heavenly ladder. Even if the feat is not comparable and Sunday is a simple mortal who cannot perform miracles just yet, he can be a better man who would do good by others for you so at the end he could do so for himself.

The chill of the fog is caressing his back even from the distance Sunday assured is there. The irritation on Shuhua’s face when her investigation gets cut short could rival Sunday’s own disenchantment with the life he was forced into. Yet even if despised, Sunday stands for what he believes is right.

“I strongly advise you to not go near that fog.” It’s the first time in a long while that he addresses someone else. Prayers have been left behind in search of belief in himself and the conversations with Kafka are all one sided. There is no need to speak when Sunday has nothing to say, and it seems even if he does now, the audience is not willing to listen.

“I strongly advise you to stay the hell away from me, birdbrain.” Shuhua is prone to snarling and threats, yet it is very hard to take her seriously when even someone as fragile in body as Sunday himself could probably pick her up by the collar of her coat just to look at her face at eye level. He wishes not to pick any unnecessary fights, yet Shuhua seems to want to pick them all, “I will tear you apart.”

You sigh, it’s so heavy as if the weight of the universe rests on your delicate shoulders. “Please stop.”

Nobody truly listens. True to your previous words, no one takes you seriously. Your wishes have no substance, and your opinion is as translucent as air that they breathe in just to exhale the next moment. There is a brief, fleeting moment in which Sunday entertains the idea of the eternal dream once more. The ideal paradise in which people listen to you all the time and not just when it’s beneficial to them, yet he pushes it aside as soon as it blossoms in his mind with blood red petals. No wishes ever come true in gilded dreams and the only way to change reality is to take action here and now. There is very little Sunday can change, however, so the only thing he can do is stand his ground.

You walk past them right into the haze of the fog, Shuhua and Aventurine casting you a passing glance of confusion. Dan Heng, for as sickly pale as he is right now, is trying hurriedly to get up with March’s help. There must be something on Sunday’s face that gives away his doubt of the safety of your actions, as you smile wearily, “It’s alright. It can do me no harm.”

Sunday’s mind does not doubt the gospel, yet his heart is his worst enemy. Despite his worries, the dark cloud lightens in color: from black to purple, then to pink, and finally it thins out enough for only to pale mist to remain floating at the edges of the glass. The silence that falls is heavier than any burden a martyr could carry. Himeko joins you by the window, respectful distance from the pinkish whisps. She seems to be contemplating something, yet the options she has must be limited and choosing between two evils is never easy. Aventurine is peeking outside where the fog is still sick and dark, obscuring the starlight. Even the cyborg – one of the galaxy rangers that Sunday does not the name of – is searching for something behind the other side of the glass.

“I warned you to take another route.” You say finally. Shuhua is distressed, it’s barely noticeable, yet the twitch of her ears gives it all away. Himeko folds her arms over her chest, troubled expression reflecting on the surface of the glass. It’s evident nobody except you and her understands what you mean by that, yet for once you aren’t trying to include everyone in the conversation. It’s between you and the woman who seems to know way more about you than Sunday prides himself on knowing. “We got too close, and we got caught by the pollution.”

“Where the fudge are we anyway?” The cyborg taps the window, metal fingers thudding unpleasantly on the glass. This shirthole–”

“Mister Boothill.” You chastise lightly. “Language.”

“S’rry, birdie.” He chuckles awkwardly, slight embarrassment to his tone. “Where are we again?”

“My home planet.” Your words are the bloodstained nails, dropped by the executioner. The blood drips off them in thick droplets of divine nectar and falls to the floor, coating the room with the saccharine scent of the paradise lost.

“Huh?” There’s something peculiarly tense about the way Aventurine looks at you behind those glasses of his, yet Boothill’s astonishment saves you a lot of questions that you most likely do not wish to answer. “Ya fudgin’ breathe poison or somethin’?” You laugh, shaking your head lightheartedly at what could have been an oddly disrespectful question if not presented in such a standoffish way.

 “Not anymore.” You confirm, “The–” then your breath gets caught in your throat and your smile falls, replaced by a very familiar longing that Sunday grew accustomed to. Yet today is Thursday and on Thursdays you watch the stars. The regret and the tears are all saved for when the clock strikes midnight on the seventh day, and you get on your knees in a prayer hidden behind a foreign tongue. “Never mind. It’s a long, boring story that will put you all to sleep.”

“[Name]–” Himeko wants to say something; she clearly made up her mind and whatever decision she came up to burdens her way more than not listening to you when she had the chance.

Yet you, as per the path you are chained to, refuse to listen to whatever she has to say, “We do need to look into that distress signal.”

“Not unless we want to get turned into ashes.” Aventurine pipes in, a little teasing behind his otherwise serious tone, “I am not ready to get dusted just yet. No offense, [Name].”

Your smile is strained. It’s unnatural and forced yet Sunday is unsure whether others realize it, “I would never take offense in your finding the desire to live.” A well-meaning comment that is aimed to hit exactly where it hurts the most. Or maybe Sunday simply is too far deep in the waters of sin, so he projects his most evil onto the saints who deserve it not. Aventurine, however, does not contemplate your intentions, simply turns away from you as if burnt as it often happens when playing with fire. “Miss Himeko, if you may?”

Himeko nods wordlessly. You hide from the view with Boothill leaving right after when the awkwardness gets a bit too much for him. Sunday has half a mind to follow you but stops before he does something very much foolish. He needs to learn to pick his battles and regulate his wishes to control everything. For the very notion of control has always been his biggest enemy.

He who has no reign over his life desires to control everything, yet what he is supposed to do now that he has nothing to rule over? To control yourself is to control your own life, yet how does he find freedom when some of the choices he makes are still very much guided by someone else’s wishes masquerading as his own? Abandoning dreams meant abandoning order, yet somehow it still dictates his life all the same.

The lighthouse has never been farther away.

None of these people are tolerant of him, least of all fond of him, and without your presence this hallway once more turns into a cage. Maybe Kafka wasn’t as awful of a companion as he initially thought and her spiderweb acted as feather-like anchor to keep his mind from floating too far away from the shore. Maybe he is terrified of what could happen now that he has been stripped of power completely, matters not that the influence he used to have was all make believe.

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, chicken boy.” Shuhua laughs, twitching ears and sharp teeth on display as a warning. “Nobody here likes you, but we aren’t going to kill you. Unless you accidentally fall into that fog and die.” She misinterprets Sunday’s silence, yet he is not sure whether she is truly capable of cold-blooded murder or simply playing it up for the sake of dispelling some tension.

The Stoneheart quirks his brow skeptically, “Do you really want a sob fest?”

For someone like Aventurine, everything in this life is all but a transaction. An eye for an eye. A favor received; a favor returned. It’s not about either of them but it’s about both of you. The idea of pushing Sunday into the man-devouring fog seems to be quite pleasant for him even if he is almost stopping the Foxian from murder just because Sunday stopped her from almost dying.

Scoffing, Shuhua points her finger at Sunday as if he’s not even there, “She’ll get over it and find another boytoy to fawn over in approximately five business days.”

The notion of you crying over his death is terrifyingly unsettling. There is no realm, be it the rivers of reality long past of the gilded cage of a dream yet to be, in which Sunday wishes for you to weep for him ever again. Neither does he wish to die before you. Or after you, for that matter. Yet dying together with your last breath caught by his lips seems like a beautiful way to end his existence.

But Shuhua, despite her never-ending hostility, is right and he doesn’t think a god would waste her last moments on the fleeting warmth of a dying sinner. Death is far too cruel to allow him to go peacefully. And so, Sunday locks any foolish thoughts behind the golden bars of a dream once more.

That is the only place where heresy belongs to.

The fog darkens, not even a sliver of starlight remains. In this darkness Sunday has trouble keeping himself afloat. The thorns drag him down to the bottom even if the hollow bones of his wings do not itch any longer.

To dream is to survive. To live is to suffer. To dream is to suffer. To live is to survive. No matter how one twists the words, the outcome is the same. Torment is unavoidable, misery is unescapable. Be it in a cage made of gold or in a life soaked in freedom, everyone suffers equally. Sunday is yet to accept that as a given, yet this anguish is probably the only thing you embrace with your torn heart. Maybe one of these days the stream will carry him to his destination, and he finally finds what he’s looking for.

Maybe for the first time in his life Sunday needs to take control of himself and not others.

 “You should come inside.”  A gentle hand on his shoulder. A tall woman – another galaxy ranger – smiles at him with a little something very tired to the curve of her lips. “They’re about to make the jump.”

Sunday stops himself from wondering what all those people are doing here. Their ship got stranded so the rest must have suffered the same fate. Everything happens for a reason, and Sunday has little to no desire to doubt anything right now. Not when that doubt could force the thorns up his body until he is crowned in them like a dying man crucified.

And so he nods, following after Acheron, “They started the engine?”

“No,” She shakes her head, the door in front of her opens automatically. “We’re breeching the atmosphere the old-fashioned way.”

Sunday has no clear idea what that entails, but the implications don’t seem very promising. Some sort of a mascot is running around the room, ushering everyone to get seated. Kafka is smiling, scooting ever so slightly closer to Himeko despite the other trying to get away from her. Firefly is rambling, March and the pesky Nameless to her right engaging her in a rather animated conversation. Boothill, Shuhua, and Aventurine seem to get along rather splendidly, considering their conflicting personalities.

The veiled Memokeeper pats the empty spot next to her in a silent invitation; Sunday knows it isn’t meant for him, so he takes a seat in the farthest corner of the couch and lets Acheron depart with no words exchanged. You are nowhere in sight. Sunday thinks that once again nobody takes you seriously even if they should. Dan Heng and an elderly man who Sunday hasn’t met before seem to be the only one to be at least a little bit troubled by the current predicament, vigilantly watching the door in case it opens.

It does not. Instead, the lights flicker rapidly, the ground shaking beneath his feet. Being sat is not enough.

Everything comes crashing down, and no seatbelts could save them from the heat of the fall through the corroding fog and the atmosphere unwelcoming to the outsiders. Someone more poetic would have called this the fall of god’s most beloved angel, Sunday knows that it is nothing more than a punishment for the sins one could never atone. Everything seems to be on fire, scorching and hostile. Sparks of light ignite outside the trembling glass windows. In the darkness of this nightmare, fate in the shape of glowing ribbons is kind enough to catch him right before Sunday slips off the couch.

The fall stops so abruptly that the train jumps upwards. The pinks and purples shimmer with the peculiar radiance, lighting up the shadows and ensuring a safe descend into the deepest circles where only the most heinous sinners could survive. That is not a place someone like you could be born in, yet it seems just right for Istanai the Repudiation.

“Is everyone okay?” Your voice is hoarse, and you look a bit worse for wear. Sweat running down your temple, you shiver. Someone says something, it gets lost in the raging waters of doubt. “I cleansed the engine as much as I could but it’s enough to make one jump far away from the fog.”

“Please be careful.” Himeko mumbles, the train shakes for the final time.

You smile, “Aren’t I always?” That smile is nothing more than a kiss to the cheek and 30 pieces of silver, yet somehow Sunday is sure that it is them who would end up weeping at the cross.

Perhaps even Himeko herself knows she is sending the lamb to the slaughter. With regrets and misty eyes, she presses her lips to your forehead. It’s a fleeting touch with nothing left of it by the time it ends, and you turn around first, leaving without even a goodbye. Stelle darts from her seat, ready to join in on another dangerous adventure, Dan Heng and March following suit until Himeko stops them, whispering something that makes March gasp audibly. Half astonished, half disappointed, she returns to her spot on the couch and drops down with a huff. If Sunday is sure of something, it’s that the lonely path you are bound to cannot offer you any constant companionship.

Kafka is watching him with that infuriating something behind the clouded haze of her eyes. Sunday hates letting her win; he despises being caught in the spiderweb of her schemes and convoluted plots written by a lunatic far worse than he, himself, is. Spending his whole life being conditioned to believe he is the one in control of the cage, Sunday has been chained to the golden bars of a tomb where they buried his freedom. Yet he is not a charmony dove in desperate need of someone looking after him, his clipped wings have long been mended and the disillusionment in a dream that cannot be is ringing in his ears in Robin’s trembling voice.

What would she do if she were in his shoes, Sunday wonders, although there is no real need to contemplate it at all. For someone like his sister – another victim of a mind far too cruel for this world – there is only one path in this life. You move towards freedom, even if it means getting caught up in the crossfire.

Kafka’s giggles die with as the distance grows. Sunday is lucky to catch you before you exit the train, yet he isn’t sure there is any more luck in his life left for you to change your mind.

Sunday isn’t fast enough to even voice his concerns before you shut him down, “I just need to check with the port security, and I will be back. One foot out, one foot in.”

“Then I shall accompany you.” How can one preserve a life without controlling it? How to change your mind when even the most drastic of measures will prove futile? If Sunday gets down on his knees and beg like a sinner would do before the heavenly lord, would you accept him then? Would telling the truth save him now that he has nothing more to his person than the wings that belong to you and the halo that he is willing to discard for your sake?

“As much as I would enjoy to go on adventure with you, Mister Sunday, I am afraid this is something I must do alone.” There’s an air of finality to your words. As if you gave up all your agency to fate and willingly chose to walk the road to your crucifixion with the shoulders carrying the weapon which inevitably will be used against you. Yet Sunday doesn’t want you to. If there is a way to share this burden, his hands are willing. If there is a way to unfasten the noose around your neck or to wipe the blood of your palms, he is ready to stain himself until everything is red. “Besides… Who will save me if I put you in danger with my own two hands?”

As usual, you make little to no sense. How can Sunday save you if he isn’t by your side? “Aeon or not, you mustn’t–”

Your palm against his cheek is warm. Thumb gliding over his skin, smearing crimson till nothing is left of his anguish. Only heartache remains; the realization that he cannot do anything but give up and let you walk outside the gilded cage of safety into the world which would never be kind to you even if you spill all your tears for it. He could not stop Robin and had to pay the price, and now with you Sunday will have to do the same. Control is never enough when you lack the power to reinforce it, the dreams are fleeting and fragile like the glass castles amongst the clouds. All Sunday can do is to believe that he will get there in time to gather your holy blood before the ground accepts it as a part of itself.

“To live is to survive.” He whispers, hopeless and sorrowful.

“To dream is to suffer.” You agree. A ruffle of your dress, the ribbons sway as you rise. Betrayal means nothing when the warmth of your lips against his cheek eradicates all vices and purifies all evil. “May the heavens be kind enough for the suffering to cease.”

The door silently closes. Sunday returns to the train cart. The shimmer of the ribbons is still glowing all around the room. The atmosphere is a bit too charged, Dan Heng and Himeko glaring at each other with various degrees of animosity. Kafka is grinning, although there is something tense to her smile that Sunday had no desire to investigate. Elio admitted he could not predict your future, so whatever script she has is probably nothing but a nonsensical piece of fiction written by a crazed lunatic.

“You know nothing.” Himeko snaps. It must not be a regular occurrence, as it earns her a couple of odd glances. “If she doesn’t contact us in five system hours, [Name] told us to leave her here.”

Sunday expected as much yet this being said out loud weights way heavier on his soul than he anticipated. Dan Heng, familiar with the aftermath of touching death firsthand, seems to share the sentiment, “You can’t do that! Himeko, what–”

“This is not my place to decide, and this is not your place to judge.” The woman cuts his sentence short, not at all content with your decision yet unable to refuse your final wish. “It’s [Name]’s choice. Her fate has found her. You should know that better than anyone, Dan Heng.”

This silences the young man way faster than Sunday anticipated. Dan Heng, oddly dejected and somewhat pained, ignores Himeko’s orders and returns to the couch. March’s comforting hand does little to soothe whatever turmoil he is going through and Himeko doesn’t hurry to apologize for hurting him. Kafka hums, a little perplexing noise, as she pets Himeko’s shoulder lightly. The red-haired woman has little strength now to refuse the spider’s advances now, face hidden in the palms of her hands.

Pompom quietly warns everyone to buckle up and the jump is way smoother this time around, yet nobody seems to be happy about the comfort. The quiet conversations and Firefly’s soft, somewhat awkward laughter fills in the void of passing hours. Scars do not itch yet old habits are hard to break, and Sunday is once again being dragged down to the bottom with the thorns of his deadly sin. One more hour, the glow of the ribbons dies along with the fog. Soon there would be nothing but darkness and the glitter of starlight illuminating the edges of the planet clouded in death.

“You seem awfully worried for someone you quite literally held hostage.” Shuhua’s voice is a fairway noise of the waves crashing against the pier. Sunday doesn’t mean to ignore her, yet he has no desire to engage her either. Pointless bickering has no merit unless both parties have something to prove. And Sunday has nothing to stand for right now. She is somewhat correct, and he is completely lost.

“Not as fun to bother now that you have nothing to hide.” Aventurine is the green glint of the precious stones scattered around the seabed. Laying amongst all those colorful rocks, Sunday lets them dig painfully into the base of his wings, till blood seeps through the open wounds. “Lame.”

“Cut him some slack, you two.” Black Swan says, a little teasing to her hushed voice, “He’s in the process of actively yearning.” Sunday wishes they would stop talking about him as if he isn’t present, yet he is not allowed to condemn them for sinning when his deeds are as unforgiving as they come.

 “Not like he knows anything about love beyond controlling the object of his obsession.” If a Memokeeper can get into Sunday’s head to pick his troubled feelings apart and put them together into some semblance of cohesion, the Stoneheart doubts the notion of Sunday having any emotions at all. It’s infuriating, yet it helps in a way. The waters may be deep, and the waves may be harsh, yet fury knows no hell like a lover scorned.

“I advise you to not speculate about my feelings.” The chill of his tone is familiar. “You might find out the true extent of their depth.”

For a second Sunday is back on Penacony, caged and buried, following orders and grasping for an ounce of control over his own actions through desperately trying to liberate those who could be saved. Would any of them try to save him? Robin would. Robin did. Now she’s somewhere out of reach, in the lighthouse Sunday can see yet can never find a way to. You would. You did. And now you are back to the dream shattered, unattainable and doomed.

Sunday has little to call his, yet his heart is worth fighting for.

Aventurine lifts his glasses, the grin on his lips is the one you would only find in hell, “Hit a nerve?” The tension increases, yet Sunday is not above playing dirty. They should know as much already. All is fair when you protect what you believe in, for the road to hell is paved with intentions most pure.

“Fifty thousand credits say you to shoot the chicken if he squares up.” Shuhua whispers, yet her voice is loud enough for everyone to hear.

Boothill clicks his tongue, “Make it a hundred, foxy. I ain’t lifting a forkin’ finger for some chump change.”

“Now now, let’s not fight.” Black Swan claps her hands to dispel some of that tension and it works. Somewhat. Sunday’s wings are still twitching under his coat, posture rigid and breathing shallow. Aventurine himself is way on guard for someone who is not ready to fight for his life, yet he is the one to throw in the towel. “We might need our knights to rescue the damsel in distress.”

“Talking about distress.” Acheron inserts herself into the situation with a surprising ease, surely not in the mood to mediate any immature conflicts yet very much willing to remind of the reason they’re all here in the first place. “It’s been four hours, Himeko.”

“I know.” Himeko nods, her expression as hazy as the fog outside this room.

Kafka huffs, amused and ready to stir the conversation where she wants it to go, “When I left you the kids, I thought you would keep them safe, Himeko. Look at you now…”

Himeko, for all her detachment now that she’s haunted by her own choices, seems to be finally ready to physically fight Kafka this time around. Her anger is short lived. And everything after that is nonexistent. It all ends here where it all began.

“Guys.” March gasps, palms pressed against the glass window. “No, guys, look.”

Stelle joins her by the window, but the others ignore her excitement as they did ten times prior to this. Yet judging by how the curve of Stelle’s lips drops suddenly, this time around they should have paid attention.

The blinding light is promised to lead all mortals to salvation of Paradise. With the scorching warmth of hell’s fire on his face, Sunday is sure that he is never destined to find the shores of redemption. The train is shaking with the aftershocks of the end of the world as they knew it. His fate is sealed with an explosion and the debris drifting into the open space, colliding with each other in a promise to never meet again.

In the eyes of Murata Himeko, Sunday can recognize the guilt which is dripping from his heavy lashes every time he brings himself down on his knees in a prayer. To live is to survive. To dream is to suffer. Paradise of eternal happiness cannot exist, for it is nothing but a pipedream of a man gone mad.

For once in the short time that he knew her, Kafka is silent. Sunday takes that silence with him into the darkness that envelopes all creation.

The curtain falls, yet as the lights go out the gilded dreams live on.

Scars do not itch yet the memory of a dream yet to be dreamt is the only proof of your existence.

[theseshipsshallsail]

Summary:

“There’s no need to apologise,” Oliver tells him - when what he really wants to say is I’m here, I’m listening: please don’t suffer alone.

INTERMEZZO

A thunderous deluge batters their East Village brownstone when Oliver jolts into fitful consciousness; the red, flashing numbers of their digital alarm clock reading 2:27 a.m once he knuckles the grit from his swollen eyelids. Next to him, the mattress is empty - crumpled sheets already cool to the touch - but levering up on his elbow he casts about for his missing maestro: breathing a sigh of relief as he eventually spots him; limned by the bright neon awning directly opposite the casement windows.

“Elio…” he murmurs, instantly wary of his stiff demeanour.

He’s donned the teal-green Oxford Oliver wore to dinner - alongside a pair of loose, cotton boxers - but the shocking contrast to his ashen skin is deeply concerning as he haltingly turns towards him. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” 

Elio blinks - hollow and haunted - his pulse thrumming rapidly at his neck. “Couldn’t sleep,” he repeats, fingers drumming an abstract rhythm where they rest on the wooden sill. “Désolé… I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“There’s no need to apologise,” Oliver tells him - when what he really wants to say is I’m here, I’m listening: please don’t suffer alone.

An ugly gravity tugs at his chest, and Elio looks both torn and devastated as he bites his bottom lip; shivering - in part - from the harsh, December air. It’s a bit like being trapped underwater - the numbing helplessness that shrouds their moonlit apartment - but the news of Samuel’s hospitalisation was a bolt from the blue, and they’ve each been a bundle of nerves since their harrowing phone call with Annella.  

“Come to bed, huh?” Oliver urges, smoothing the covers in gentle invitation. “Your goosebumps will get goosebumps by that draughty pane.” 

It’s a simple enough suggestion - though evidently the straw that breaks the camel’s back - and Oliver curses the cruelty of the human condition when Elio sobs like it’s torn out of him; crossing the Rubicon in three loping strides to throw himself into his arms.

“I’m scared…” he gasps, chestnut curls tickling his nose as a car horn blares on the street outside. “My dad, Oliver -”

“- is strong as an ox,” he reassures quickly, kneading the bunched-tight muscles of Elio’s heaving shoulders, attempting to warm him up. “With access to some of the best doctors Europe has to offer.” The Policlinico di Milano is indeed a lauded institution. “You’re mom and Mafalda are with him right now, and there’s a direct flight to Malpensa leaving at noon.” Oliver swallows hard; reluctant to name the nebulous dread swirling beneath his ribs. “No matter the diagnosis, we’ll get through this, yeah?”

“But what if it’s serious?” Elio asks plaintively. “What if he doesn’t?”

A beat.

“Then we’ll find a way to get through that too,” he swears: much the same as they’ve weathered every storm these past sixteen years. “Together.”

“Together,” Elio repeats - voice devoid of all emotion - and Oliver makes sure to hold him even closer; whispering words of broken comfort amidst the gut-wrenching tears that follow. 

Notes:

Sorry. I know this isn't my usual festive fare, but I wrote this back in the summer when things weren't so great, and just rediscovered it on my hard drive. I'll get something lighter up for New Years, promise ❤️

[cowbok]

We Are Monsters Now.

(Its not everyday that i write something but enjoy this One-Shoot about Catnap and Dogday!)

Theodore was a timid child. Soft spoken, introverted, and quiet most of the times. But that was in the past, three years before he was transformed into this... Monster.

This creature, this... Thing. The adults working around the daycare that were unnaware of the inhumane experiments, they thought he was nothing but some kind of animatronic for the children.

The children thought he was the real Catnap from the TV show.

But he wasn't. He was Theo. He was once a human being, until the day all that changed, when he went asleep, the most deep sleep he ever got... And woke up like this... Monster.

He was kind of lucky, tho... That he didn't undergo all this pain alone. Some of his friends had suffered the same destinies, waking up in the new bodies, as big creatures that were meant to entretain and obey.

.... That's not really lucky.

But he'll be lying if he said he wasn't at least a bit glad he wasn't all alone in this... Elio, and the rest of his friends were now the... "Smiling Critters".

Still, that didn't mean he wasn't angry. Even with the company of his friends. He tend to act out. To try numerous time to escape. To try to hurt the scientists when they came to analize him

To try to have contact with beings he shouldn't have.

And, of course, all that fighting always got him in trouble. Cruel punishments of isolation. Like right now.

One of the scientist had found out that Theo tried to break in the labs in search of his... God. For his insolence, now he was being punished by not having dinner, by being a prisoner in that little cell.

And soon, by the one and only Leith Pierre who seemed... Upset.

- You are such a pain... - He said while standing outside of the cell. Protected from the ire of Theo. Using a gas mask, of course. He wasn't and idiot. - Do you have any idea of what you have done today... It could have been the end of us all - He explained, slowly.

Theo just growled. Even if his voice box was broken, he had nothing to say to that man.

- Gather yourself, 1188. You're no longer a little kid. You should understand now that actions have consecuences. - Pierre exhaled, and snapped his fingers.

Two more men appeared from behind him, using masks as well, and rods between their hands. Blue and yellow sparks escaped from the tip of the rods. They were going to electrocute him... How... funny.

- Maybe after you get a dosage of discipline, you'll start listening to the scientists and be a good Catnap for the children, won't you?

The two men opened the door, pointing the rods at Theo at every moment in case he tried to do something risky. They closed the door behind them and got closer, and closer.

Theo hissed and growled. His tail moving rapidly.

And suddenly, there was a scream. But it wasn't from Theodore.

But from Pierre.

- GET THIS MONSTER AWAY FROM ME-EE!! - Barely could talk as Elio was holding his throat between his orange hands

- YOU DON'T GET TO HURT HIM, YOU DON'T GET TO- - Elio tried. But he couldn't bring himself to actually press hard enough to choke Pierre.

- DOGDAY! STOP IT!! - Said one of the scientists still inside Theo's cell, rushing to get the door open while the second one still pointed at Theo with the rod.

- KILL HIM, KILL HIM!!! - Theo cried out loud. This was it, this was his chance of escaping!

If Elio killed Pierre, then they could use his key to get anywhere in the factory. They could free everybody, they could run away, they could...

Elio still wouldn't press Pierre's thoart hard enough... His hands were trembling, and he seemed stuck in one place, almost like if he was shocked with the heaviness of the situation.

It was too late. The scientist manage to open the cell door and hitted Elio with their rod, sending a wave of electricity throught his body.

His yellowish, dog-like body hit the ground, now unconsious.

The scientist helped Pierre to get up.

- Goodness gracious... You're not only a burden, you also have started to corrupt the other as well? -He said, looking at Theo. - Dogday had never acted out like this before!

Theo wasn't paying to much attention. He just felt his one chance fading away like nothing all because... Because...

- Get Dogday into a cell as well, now! - That was the last thing Pierre said before walking away.

The scientist called for some help to carry Elio's limp body into a cell. Then, decided to leave Theo alone for the rest of the night. Too much chaos now to keep going with the program.

Elio started to wake up. His cell next to Theo's.

- What... Happened? - He said slowly. Talking with the broken voice box was hard. But he wasn't going to let any scientist get close to him to fix it...

- I... I don't know... - Elio answered.

- You.... Didn't... Kill him

- No... I guess i didn't...

-.... - Theo didn't say anything. He just stared at Elio for a few seconds.

-... Oh. Well!! What did you wanted me to do?!?! I saw what they were about to do to you! i-i just acted out of instincs!! I didn't know what to do, alright?!

- You... Should have... Killed him

- Oh, really?! And for what?! What use would that have been?!

- We could... Have ESCAPED!

- WHAT'S THE POINT?!

The prison stayed silent for a long while. Elio had his head down, looking at the dirty floor, while Theo keep looking at him thourgh the bars with those withish, creppy eyes... Trying to understand.

- What.... What do you... Mean?

- Oh please, Theo! You really think we can escape?!?! That there's a chance?! We're not twelve anymore!! - Elio snapped back, standing up, walking as far away from Theodore as he could. - Grow up!

-.... What? - He whispered, and the light left his eyes.

- Alright, just think for a moment... Let's say we escape... What then? Do we go to the police? Us? A big purple cat and a yellow dog?! O-or maybe we first search for some mad scientist that's good of heart and knows how to give us human bodies first? Hmm? Does that seems like a plan?!

- Elio....

- Or perhaps we just survive out of trash for a few days until they send a searching party for us and when they capture us!!.... And they'll capture us... They'll just punish us horribly... - Elio turned to see Theo this time. -

The purple cat was holding the bars, his expression unreadable.

- Theo... Even if we escape... We'll never be truly free... We'll never get into highschool, o-or get a degree, or get to live a normal life... Look at us! We're monsters now... There's nothing for us out there... All we have is this place now

- No... - Theo mumbled, a dark liquid dripping from his eyes.

- The least we can do now is... Protect the other kids so they don't end up like us. - Elio sighed, sitting on the ground. - But, lets face it... We're both 15 now... It's been 3 years trapped inside this bodies... There's no turning back. We will never turn back...

"We are monsters, Theo. Let's face it'

[suunfilled]

444 (you're still blue).

— In which Elio breaks up with Kie. Her first move? To call her mom.

— Tags: @meistwentyinchheels, @calico-fleur.

— Likes & reblogs are appreciated! <3

NOW PLAYING: TV - BILLIE EILISH

Kie makes a point to call her A-ma with Kalo whenever she gets the chance to—but with how hectic classes have been, they’ve all agreed to keep it to one call every two weeks. It’s taken a bit of working around, but with Kalo’s eye for a meticulous schedule, they’ve managed to fit exactly one call every two weeks into all three of their schedules. The time varies, but it somehow always lands at a time when they’re all available to talk.

And maybe it’s the lack of sleep or the wave of heartbreak so overwhelming he’s clutching at his chest, but Kie might have forgotten that 2:37 in the morning on a Tuesday is not one of those times.

Still, her a-ma picks up.

“Kie?” And oh, the static of her voice is so sweet and familiar and unknowing that hearing it only serves to bring fresh tears to Kie’s eyes.

“A-ma–” Kie starts, voice hitching from how violently his hiccups jerk his body, “I— I–...A-ma—”

“Baby,” her A-ma murmurs, and there’s a rustling on the other end of the line; fabric, most likely a blanket being pushed aside. “What’s wrong? Is everything okay?”

Kie likes to think he is a good child. He puts every modicum of effort he can summon into making sure his A-ma doesn’t have to worry about him—from patching up his own knee scrapes and memorizing which steps creaked along the pathway from his room to the medicine cabinet, to filling out all of his college applications alone and booking his own flight all the way across the country so she wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of it for him; he does all he can to make sure his A-ma does not have to waste more of her concern on him than she already does.

Kalo was always a little reliant on A-ma, anyway. Why would Kie want to give her A-ma someone else to constantly worry about the way she does with Kalo, even now that it’s grown up and a little more independent? How could she ever hope to be so presumptuous as to think her A-ma would take on that kind of responsibility without some kind of consequence?

How could he even dare to put that much more on her shoulders?

(How could anyone?)

…

But then again, these are outstanding circumstances. Unavoidable circumstances. The kind that would make someone call their mom at two in the morning just to cry about it.

And Kie, for all of her cautiousness and self-reliance, knows that A-ma understands those kinds of circumstances better than anyone.

Kie likes to think he is a good child.

Maybe this whole time, she’s been thinking wrong.

Because the way he lets a sob, unrestrained, gurgle from his throat and directly into the speaker of his phone as his body heaves over like the weight of the world is pressing down on his back—that is not something a good child would do.

“No, A-ma,” she wails, fingers digging creases into a sticky note covered in scribbled scars—a memento, a tribute to what she’d lost not moments before, “it’s— I’m not okay.”

A-ma is a good mom, though.

And maybe, for once, Kie can let himself be selfish enough to be grateful for that.

(It’s not like he has much of a choice right now, anyway.)

“Kie, honey,” A-ma says, kind but firm in a way that brings her a couple inches back to reality—not quite, but it’s there nonetheless and she knows it. “Talk to me, okay? What happened? Are you hurt, or—?”

“I—” A loud hiccup pierces through his sentence. Still, he claws away at the lump in his throat until it’s cleared enough for him to weep, “M– my boyfriend broke up with me. Five minutes ago.”

“Oh, Kie,” A-ma mumbles, her voice laden with the kind of sympathy only a mother could muster. “I’m so sorry, baby— what happened? Did he just leave, or–?” “He called.” Another hiccup, quieter this time. “I told him whatever he wanted to say, he could just say it over the phone.”

There’s a long pause—too long. “I shouldn’t have– but it…it would have hurt more if I had to look at him while he said it.”

Of course it would have hurt more. How could he have looked Elio—sweet, loving, caring Elio—in the face and listened to him say those words and pretended it was okay?

It would have been impossible.

“I can’t stay, Kie.”

“I know.”

“...I’ll call you. I promise.”

“I know.”

She had not known. Still, foolishly, selfishly—she had chosen to believe.

(Again, it wasn’t like she’d had much of a choice.)

A-ma is quiet. She knows Kie has more to say—how she knows, he’ll never understand. But he takes the opportunity to speak while it’s there; even if he’s barely getting the words out.

Her voice comes out meek—embarrassingly so. “A-ma, will—...will it be okay?”

He knows the answer.

He knows what A-ma tells her won’t be true.

He listens anyway.

“Of course, baby.”

And maybe that should have been enough.

Maybe she should have believed A-ma, then—believed that by some force of pure luck, by the sheer willpower that had carried her this far, it would somehow be okay. She would somehow be okay. It hurts now, hurts in a way she cannot hope to explain—but in her mind she knows that this hurt won’t last forever.

(Maybe he’d thought wrong about that too.)

“I don’t want to—” Kie starts, voice thick with unshed tears. By some miracle, with nails threatening to tear through soft sleeves and tear tracks bleeding into the corners of her mouth, she finds it in herself to continue. “I don’t want to miss him, A-ma. I– I loved him. I loved him so much and it wasn’t enough.”

A-ma hasn’t stopped whispering her comforts, voice a crackle through the tinny speakers of his phone. It soothes him, the way his A-ma’s presence always has—but the ache in his chest is making it so, so hard to breathe.

“I want to hate him,” Kie chokes out, a sob clogging up her throat again—louder, more insistent, demanding to be heard. “I want to hate him so fucking much. I– I wish I never met him!”

A-ma’s voice is tender, like a hug. “You don’t mean that, baby.”

Kie’s, in return, is tender like a bruise. “I wish I did.”

And maybe some part of him wishes he could hate Elio. Maybe some part of him wishes he could look at that stupid smile and those stupid eyes and the stupid curve of the knuckles lining his stupid fucking hands, and feel none of the staggering longing that crushes against his ribs like it’s trying to break them.

But Kie knows better than to rely on wishes.

“I thought—” she starts, mortified when her voice somehow splinters into several pieces, cramped within two little syllables. “I thought he loved me, A-ma, but– but he didn’t love me. He...he didn’t even like me.”

“He didn’t?”

“He called it off,” Kie continues, and all of a sudden the words feel like they won’t stop no matter how much he hiccups or sobs or tries to stop talking. “He’s the one who said it wasn’t supposed to be anything serious, that love wasn’t supposed to happen— that whatever I felt for him wasn’t supposed to happen– I told him I loved him and he told me— he told me to my face that someday I’d fucking move on—”

Doing her best to halt her words there, she heaves in a breath and tries to will away the piercing ache blooming near her temples. A-ma is quiet on the other end, but she’s listening. She’s always listened.

“I— I still love him, A-ma.”

The response, this time, is immediate.

“I know you do, baby.”

“But I don’t want to feel like this.”

“I know. It hurts, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine how heartbroken you must feel right now, Kie, and I am so sorry he did this to you.”

“He told me he didn’t care what happened last year. He said he’d stay– he’d stay with me, no matter what. He— he told me he loved me.”

“I know.”

“And I— I believed him.”

“That’s not your fault, baby.”

“Then why does it hurt so badly?”

“Because you still love him, Kie. Even if he doesn’t love you the way you love him.”

Another moment of silence. It doesn’t feel nearly as reverent as moments of silence usually do.

“...will I be okay, A-ma?”

“Someday, baby. Someday.”

Maybe, he thinks, that will be enough.

(Maybe, like all the other times, he’s thinking wrong.)

“I love you, A-ma.” “I love you too, Kie. Get some rest, okay?”

“I will. Goodnight.” “Sleep well, baby.”

The line goes dead. Kie kneels there next to her bed, surrounded by scattered sticky notes scrawled with at least a hundred little memories packed into the few study breaks she’d taken with him, and she does not cry because maybe if she can will away the tears, it’ll feel okay for as long as she can hold on.

(Maybe.)

[heartfullofleeches]

For all the yans who have to deal with loser reader. How would they feel if loser reader was...well themselves every other day of the year, but on their birthday they damn near worship the ground they walk on? I mean, it's still loser reader so they'd probably still complain about it but they do everything their yan/s say and generally treat them like royalty on their special day

Melon - Yanbot: The most normal about it. All they desire is to wear your clothes and sleep the day away with you. They ask you to accompany them to the grocery store so they can pick out a cake with your favorite flavor and other things they wish they could try, and watch you eat them. They're cheerful year round, but any praise and they'll be over the moon. Sets a countdown until their next "birthday" and replays the recording from that day every night until that day

Elio - Saint Yan: The second most more about it... On the surface. "OH, haha - you don't need to do all this for me. I'm more than happy just having you here...." That's a lie - on all plains but physical they're doing cartwheels." Drags you to stores they'd never go into on any other day and doesn't try on anything until they see your interest peaked. "H-hey Y/n.... What do you think of this choke- I mean collar. It's not for me - it's for my cousins dog! I'm just wearing it for reference.... But um - since it's my day and all... would you call me your good pet and let me fall asleep on your lap?"

Blythe - Yan Angel: The true most normal about it. She appreciates the kind words, but all this gal wants to do is play mini golf and go to as many buffets you can find and fill yourself up on before they kick you out. She's still buying you everything you see as is her sugar mama ways, but she cries, begging you on her knees to use your tickets to buy her a spider ring from whatever arcade you end up at

Tsundere Yan: Fucking finally. Sucks that shit up like a fine soup. Doesn't give a damn about your whining and insists you call them your dearest or they won't answer you at all. Cancels the huge gathering planned and raises their middle finger to whoever tries to complain or lessen their time with you under their will and thumb. If they aren't having your kid by the end of the night there will be riots.

Yan Demon Trio: "Birthday??" "Outta my way, losers." One is the only one with an actual birthday as they were once human. Sure the others were born, but they don't count the day as important. One is living that birthday hype up. They applied to every rewards deal they could find and you are joining them to get their free cake, ice cream, and useless nicknacks. They demain you bake them a cake despite the haul they carry home and devour all it first no matter how terrible it tastes. They honestly miss being human, but it's not all bad since they met you.

The others watch One and want their own free shit day too. As with them - they enjoy the treats but love whatever you give them more. They close out the day with their favorite activity/hobby, draining you completely dry - only you wear whatever they buy you. For One it's some high quality lingerie, Two enjoys those cow bikinis, Three wants you to be their cute bunny - but they get too attached to seeing with the ears and settles for just the suit honestly

[shadowcatzone]

Ok but like when the egg hatches Dan Heng calling to Blade (luckily Elio predicted this and sent him over early)

And the baby is so small?? They’re both floored. This child was inside of Dan Heng not too long ago?????

Blade reaching out to like. Poke their cheek. Kind of hesitantly, almost scared — likewhatifhismaraandthebloodonhishandstarnishesthem — and the baby just reaches up to wrap their tiny hand — so tiny!? — and it’s small enough to completely wrap around his finger.

And Blade buries his face in Dan Heng’s shoulder because his brain has crashed (again) and is in a constant state of ???????????????????????????

blade bluescreening is a popular idea, at least in my mind,

they're just going to stay home for a few days/weeks/months/years ok. They love their child so much. It's so cute. Aaaaah.

(Meanwhile Caelus might comment on the baby looking weird/ugly and dan heng will just. Try to throw him out of the express window (mid-voyage))

And also they will be devastated (affectionately) at every minor milestone their child makes. Baby opens their eyes? Starts making grabby hands at things they like? They start babbling? The two are over the moon and also treating it like the kid found the cure for cancer, like omg. You love your kid, we know.

Also for your consideration, at naptime: baby sleeping in dan hengs arms, dan heng sleeping in blades arms blade... sleeping... thanks to kafka, probably. I dont think the man can sleep. And all three of them under a blanket. (Bailu put the blanket on them, as a responsible big sister.)

[blank-house]

Who is the best at heating up a cold mc? I'm talking who drops everything for a snuggle, who gets them a jumper or who is shivering right along with them? lol thank you!

Percy

The warmest guy is Percy wheeze

Idk when and why I decided that he’s the walking heater out of everyone but he just radiates warmth. It’s why you’ll never see him bundle up even when it’s winter.

If you’re cold, he’ll open his arms and welcome you in his embrace. Pressing his fingers to your neck and sides, teasing you because “if you wanted my hands on you, just say so. You don’t need to make an excuse like ‘it’s too damn cold’ to get me close ;)”

But he would silently hope he’s helping you. He hugs you to his chest so that at least his tall frame can warm you up and protect you from the cold. He’d slip your hands in his pockets and cradle them, or bring them up to his lips so he can press a cheeky kiss before blowing warm air over your knuckles. He’d shrug off his jacket and drape it over you, the smallest of smiles on his face when he sees the relief on your face. Anything, he’ll do anything to keep you warm.

Hmm— it’s now coming back to me why I decided he’s the warmest. Shdhdehdd

Elio

Elio feels the chill more than the others do. It’s because he grew up in tropic weather so the New York cold isn’t something he’s accustomed to even after two years on campus. So he’s the one shivering with you lol

In the winter time, he’s not wearing his bucket hat. But a beanie or an earflap cap. He’ll have extra on hand along with thick coats and puffers that he’s more than happy to share if you need it. The penguin huddle is his favorite strategy and he’ll cling to your side hoping that together you guys can brave the weather.

If you guys are indoors and it’s still freezing because curse this building’s weak heater, then he’ll bring out the blankets. Elio is for sure the one asking for snuggles if you’re willing to give it :,)

With a quilt or three blankets over his shoulder, Elio would blink at you from under his hat. He’d pull a corner away from himself as an invitation and depending on how close or how long you’ve been dating he’ll ask “Do you want to share it with me?” with either the biggest grin or a shy smile.

Say yes, and he’ll cheer before diving to wrap you up with him. Shoulders and knees brushing, Elio would stay underneath the covers forever with you.

Jamie

Sjdjdheh he’s always running cold (even in the Spring or Summer his hands are cold to the touch) so I feel like he’s not the best at warming MC up— but that doesn’t mean he’s the worst.

Jamie would hesitate on keeping close since he’s not the warmest. But if you need a blanket he’ll acquire one, whether he already has one on hand or if he needs to buy it. Same thing with any jackets or sweaters you might want— he does own a lot of sweaters ^^

If those don’t help, well he certainly knows how to make warm batches of cookies. He’s got plenty of desserts and drinks that can warm you up on the inside. “Just a little longer. The madeleine are almost done and I’ve got a cup of cocoa for you too.”

He might not be able to warm you up himself, but Jamie would be damned if he can’t do anything about your state. Crank up the heaters if he must, put on the kettle, bake another batch! He’ll do what he can to keep you warm.

And if you’re dating… (skip if you don’t want to see what Jamie’s like yet)

“I know of other ways to keep your body warm.”

DJFHRHEHEHRHD words alone might have done the trick in raising your body temperature— UGH WIPE THAT SMUG GRIN OFF YOUR FACE PORTER— but he’s also a man of his word.

[strawbyarts]

I Have a Question:How would you imagine it would be The New Dream Child?

(In my Opnion,i Imagined a Little Boy called Elio Fitzherbert,is a character that i made for my Fic in AO3 called Tangled:7 years AU)

oooo tough question, but a good one!! i always struggle so bad with making ship children, i don’t know why. i absolutely love the name Elio though! it sounds like it must mean “the Sun” which feels so fitting for New Dream. what a genius pick!

physically, i can see brown hair, maybe hazel eyes, eugene’s nose, rapunzel’s big eyes and freckles. the kid must be super clever and creative with rapunzel and eugene as parents. rapunzel would finger paint with them plenty. eugene would read and tell stories to them so often. rapunzel would sing lullabies, and eugene could join in. ah, and i can see eugene often pushing their hair out of their face! even if their hair is short. i headcanon it’s because he’s grown a habit to do that to the people he loves closest to him since he’s done it to rapunzel so much. rapunzel would want to be the opposite of gothel, always letting their kid explore and awarding curiosity.

i can totally see their kid drawing or painting with mama raps one day and then running to show papa eugene with raps. its a picture of the three of them and eugene’s nose is all sorts of wonky but he’s like “you got my nose just right!”

thank you for asking!!

[coruscqte]

what is xiayu’s relationship with the stellaron hunters? how do they feel about her? i’d love to hear! ur thoughts are always intriguing :3

to preface this, while i do enjoy the hunters im not actually particularly familiar with most of them :0! with the very narrow exception of firefly, i did have to go poking around on the wikia for interactions and such to find somewhere to start.

+ secondly you left a couple questions in the tags of her last post so i'll try and answer those too! <3 (i would kill for your tags btw i hope you know that /pos)

also tagging @sundays-wing-piercing + @lesbianbootheng as per usual <3

kafka:

this is a weird one because kafka, besides firefly and blade, is likely the one that interacts with xiayu the most. pops up whenever she’s least expected, just looking to see what she might be up to every few years. depending upon how you see the relationship she has with the trailblazer, she probably feels as if she has some … vague responsibility to look out for her. keep her out of trouble at least.

its not like her parents need her to, with three trailblazers someone would be lucky to walk away with all their fingers if they touched a hair on her head, but it never hurt to just. check on her if she was on planet. then message her. then meet up with her. of course not. kafka’s the furthest thing from maternal, but she fits neatly into a rich aunt slot. sort of. if that rich aunt had a gun.

though i dont think kafka would want her to be a hunter. as much as she preaches that xiayu should be equally fearless (“a vidyadhara with magic at her fingertips and a half decent shot with an axe? tell me, what is it that one little dragon has to be afraid of?”), its not like approves of her putting herself in unnecessary danger. not without her present, at least.

appreciates the finer things in life. sends ahead these dubiously earned things in the space mail for xiayu to wear or use. most of these things are packed away in her closet, but sometimes she wears this pearl bracelet kafka bought her for her fifteenth birthday (“oh hush, trailblazer. she could use something a little womanly, don’t you think?”).

occasionally, if they do run into each other, they get dinner. discuss nothing of any true importance, its off script usually between scenes, and having someone new around — young, fresh — its invigorating to kafka.

what xiayu thinks of her is equally a mystery. i think she considered becoming a hunter shortly after march’s death and still rides the fence on the topic today, but before kafka died, she’d said elio had no place for her in the script. that she was never going to be a true actor in any of their scenes.

of course, necessary redirection. whether xiayu continues to take this as proper advice is truly up to time. whether it was fate that she eventually loses everyone but her father (and that she will lose him someday), she’s not sure if she wants to be a slave to destiny. really, she doesnt know if she already is or not.

blade:

i. am not sure. i am incredibly xing/yue pilled, im ren//heng pilled only because a beloved mutual of mine is, so xiayu just appearing in canon probably throws blade for a loop. a) *how* and b) why.

(in my uber perfect world its just one big polycule. jinghengren / danstellemarch / stellefly. this is not my uber perfect world)

but i like to imagine a canon where blade and dan heng are able to reconcile their past lives and at least become amicable towards each other again. maybe not friends, but also not stab-on-sight.

xiayu is so small and innocent to him that hes just not really sure what to make of her. this ankle biting child that clings onto his pants is not exactly easily understood and he does not want to be left alone with her. at all. so much joy in a tiny person good god. he’d sooner pawn her off to kafka or firefly before she stays with him.

though i dont think she’s scared of him. fascinated by him maybe, esp as a child she likes his eyes. its bit terrifying to turn a little and see a baby staring you down though.

but an older xiayu, if blade lives long enough to see her mature into a young adult ... is probably not all that different from firefly. amped to 11. hes not sure where she gets the energy (read: its from march). surely he comes to care about her just a smidge. a little even. maybe has one of the hunters send a message for him if theyre both on the same planet (though kafka will usually message her first). she gets exactly one (1, singular) sword-wielding lesson from him, and thats about it. to him, she has potential, if she just matures a little.

seeing someone so ready to throw their life away when she’s so young and full of life is … disorienting. his time has been up for quite a long time now, but her’s is just beginning. he cant make heads or tails of why shes like this.

i wonder if he sees dan heng in her, in her face, wonder if hes seeing his old friend in three separate ways -- through dan feng, dan heng and now his daughter. terrible facade she puts up after march and stelle are gone, but should he live long enough to see them pass, i think blade of all people might be the one to rationalize their deaths to her. after all, its finality at work. you cant escape fate, you can only use it. life goes on, and even if you don’t wan it, people will stay you with long after they’ve left this plane.

though blade’s good ending to me is him dying long before xiayu is born at all. this is just a hypothetical.

silver wolf:

im not sure silver wolf knows what to make of the trailblaze baby. and im not sure that xiayu knows what to make of her either. unlike her and firefly they relate on less things and are closer in age as well. begrudgingly, silver wolf probably offers to play games with her when she gets old enough.

though, i do think she keeps an eye out for her in public channels. nothing too fancy, silver wolf wouldnt be caught dead risking her neck for a kid that didn’t even care about her all that much — but she figures its the least she can do if kafka likes her. she’ll remove a record here, tip the scales in her favor there, other than that theyre simply gaming partners and not much else.

silver wolf is still the better gamer. just because xiayu lives longer doesn’t mean she’ll ever win. after all, silver wolf has never pulled her punches.

firefly:

firefly was at the baby shower. for sure. she brought a little gift, it was xiayu's first mobile. i like to think it had butterflies patterned like her dress over it. looking out for her, in a way lol

also, the only stellaron hunter allowed to babysit. not that the three of them tend to use babysitters very often, but if firefly isn't on a script, stelle sometimes calls her.

i dont think xiayu has ever seen sam for herself 🤔 even if we’re particularly optimistic im not actually sure how long firefly will live for in canon. she might not even live long enough into xiayu’s “normal” adulthood at 20ish. given she may discover her “aunt’s” altered form on her own, but its not incredibly likely and thats okay. firefly wants to be known as herself to xiayu, rather than what she was made to be.

flair for the dramatics though. is the one sending all the (watered down) stories for xiayu to read. cultivates her thrill seeking, and she thinks being a stellaron hunter is SO cool for a little while.

firefly (?) maybe have been the first time she experienced true loss, if himeko + welt didnt go first. i think that was a bit of a shell shock, but thats also probably how she figured out she could keep sending messages to dead people’s ids. she misses her aunt too.

i think out of all of the hunters, firefly is the one she was closest with. someone she could really talk to if she got into an argument with her parents or if she just wanted to do something silly or girly or mundane with a non family member.

i do think that firefly inspired her to be just who she was though. not stelle or march or dan heng. just that she herself was enough, that she herself was at her best no matter what. it was a rather sweet parting gift that firefly left for her, and i think it must be one of her accessories that she also wears.

-

and then i'll do my very best to address these!

xiayu's catcake is named dragonfruit creamcake <3 munyamunyamunyamunyamunya, that poor cat will meow your ear off until you get sick of it or it manages to tire itself out. then itll plop itself in your lap and youre not allowed to move unless you want it to yap at you even more.

it does seem particularly fond of rice dumpling, trashcake and ice cake. it likes to "chat" whenever anyone unlucky enough to enter the lab interacts with it, and has routinely managed to escape the little catcaketopia in ruan mei’s lab. truly, it has asta stumped -- ruan mei didn't create it, the trailblazer didn't make it, where did this creation come from?

like any good mother with their rambunctious toddler, stelle of course took xiayu out to teach her baseball. now, this did mean pompom lost a vase or two whenever xiayu swung a little too hard on the express, but by the time she's a little older she has decent technique. because she doesn't carry the traditional bat, shes not known as the galactic baseballer, but it worries yanqing that she doesn't wield the axe like an axe -- its distinctly as if she treats it like a bludgeoning object.

(classically trained swordsman v gung-ho axe wielder, who wins?)

interestingly enough, xiayu sees yanqing as an estranged elder brother almost. he often wonders if he was this irresponsible as a child, and then thanks jing yuan for raising him. multiple times.

she is decent at video games! she prefers a handheld console that stelle bought for her compared to the phone that she owns, she and stelle are 1-4 right now on one of the newer games, she’s just waiting for her mom to get back to do a proper rematch. until then, she plays other games on her console.

extra fact i thought of while writing this: do you think dan heng is the one that sees his partners in his daughter? like, has a deja vu moment everytime she smiles a certain way or says something just the way one of them would? he knows he isn't dan feng, he never wanted to be treated as such, but to acknowledge the same of xiayu, that she isn't her mothers, that is so much more difficult.